A study reveals that medical students and trainee doctors make up over half of all the injuries made by pricks from infected needles in hospitals. Aside from being overworked, these doctors and students don\u2019t get vaccinated against diseases which could be transmitted through infected blood.<\/p>\n
The dangers of such injuries and the health risk that the staff faces are mentioned in a recent study conducted by the Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital- is a teaching hospital at Sion. It\u2019s been considered that for health workers, needle stick injuries are occupational hazards. They could result in infections including Hepatitis B and HIV. Work stress is one of the reasons why such injuries happen.<\/p>\n
The study- published in the International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences- suggests better training as well as awareness on getting vaccinated to bring down the number of such cases.<\/p>\n
The study found that in the Lokmanya Tilak hospital alone, of the 105 such injuries reported between January 2014 and June 2015, an overwhelming 70% were among medical students. 28.6% of these were reported in the medicine department.<\/p>\n
However, only 57.1% of the health workers were vaccinated against Hepatitis B. 26.6% were incompletely vaccinated while 16.2% were not at all vaccinated.<\/p>\n
As per Dr Sagar Mundada, a former president of the resident doctors\u2019 association, all student doctors are asked to finish HbV vaccination program at 0-3-6 months, at the beginning of their internship. But many times, the doctors fail to follow the complete routine, thereby becoming vulnerable to the infections.<\/p>\n
According to Dr Sujata Baveja, a co-author of the study, though vaccination programs against HIV and HbV are run in many tertiary care hospitals, more awareness among health workers is necessary.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most common risk is of HbV, even more than HIV, because of the high risk of spreading the infection. During the study, we found out that 16.2% of HCWs were not vaccinated against the virus and 39% didn\u2019t start the post-exposure prophylaxis (or emergency HIV treatment for prevention) immediately after being infected,\u201d said Dr Baveja.<\/p>\n
Many cases don\u2019t even get reported<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s also been said that though a number of cases happen, not all get reported. That\u2019s why there\u2019s very little data on how many resident doctors or staff members actually contract infections from pricks or wounds.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are often so busy that even after knowing the patient is HIV or HbV positive, we don\u2019t have the time to wear gloves while collecting blood samples, because of the workload and long queues of patients. Many times, even the patients don\u2019t inform us about their case history,\u201d said one resident doctor to the Hindustan Times.<\/p>\n The researchers say that there are over 20 blood borne diseases. However, for health care workers, HIV, HcV and HbV are the significant ones. It\u2019s also revealed that in 81% of the injuries the source of infection was unknown to the health workers. This indicates a carelessness among many health workers while attending to high-risk patients.<\/p>\n Only in 19.04% was the source of the HIV infection known, notes the study. In the rest of the cases, the health workers weren\u2019t even aware that the patient had HIV. For high risk HbV and HcV, the status was known just in 18.9% of instances. The risk of contracting HbV and HcV through infected blood are 33.3% and 3.3% respectively, as per the experts. The risk for contracting HIV is 0.31%.<\/p>\n \u201cSharp injuries represent a high risk of hazard that people working in the hospital face on daily basis. Prevention of injuries is the best way to prevent the infections and there is much room for improvement by combination of programmes, like institutional behaviour and device management, adequate training in safe use and disposal of needles and a culture of reporting cases and aftercare,\u201d said Dr Baveja.<\/p>\n Image credits: hindustantimes.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A study reveals that medical students and trainee doctors make up over half of all the injuries made by pricks from infected needles in hospitals. Aside from being overworked, these doctors and students don\u2019t get vaccinated against diseases which could be transmitted through infected blood. The dangers of such injuries and the health risk that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":4123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[24,25,431,488],"class_list":["post-4122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-doctor","tag-medicine","tag-needle","tag-trainee"],"yoast_head":"\n