Needle sticks and scalpel cuts are always a potential risk that health care workers are facing. This is why it is important for the hospital to have a good medical waste management system and to limit the possibility of these accidents happening. Unfortunately, even with perfect medical removal processes, incidents with sharps can still happen. If they occur, a medical worker must know how to deal with them.

The danger of sharp injuries comes from the fact that a used needle or other sharps instrument could be infected with a blood-borne virus such as HIV or Hepatitis C or B. These viruses can easily transfer to the person they injure.

Read this article further to find out how to deal with different sharps injuries.
First Aid
1. Spur bleeding at the place of injury. Run cool water over the area where the blooding occurs for a couple of minutes. This will eliminate many of the potential infectants and reduce their entry to the bloodstream. This is necessary to do, as if a virus manages to enter the bloodstream, it is easy for it to start multiplying.
2. Wash the wound throughly, but gently. Cleanse the side of the sharps injury with anti-bacterial soap after you’ve encouraged bleeding sufficiently. Don’t suck the wound or scrub it.
3. Dry and cover the wound with a sterile and water-proof material.
4. Remove any contaminated clothing. If a piece of your clothing got in contact with blood, remove it and place it into a plastic bag. Wash any parts of your body that was in contact with infectious clothing.
Seek Medical Attention
1. Seek medical attention. Immediately after administering first aid and sanitizing the wound, you should ask for medical assistance. Point out to the medical worker what happened and how you received the injury. Ask him or her about the potential diseases. Also, test the blood to determine further treatment method.
2. Ascertain if there is any virus exposure. Determine via blood tests if you are exposed to any virus or other exposure. This particularly goes for HIV. Prevent sero-conversion immediately. The sero-conversion from needle pricks is 0..03%. Fortunately, this is very low so there is no need for panic. If an HIV exposure is likely, it’s not the “end” as long as you get a PEP (post exposure prophylaxis) within one hour.
The risk of Hepatitis is significantly greater than that for HIV, with 10% chance for C and 30% for B type. You will need to employ quick preventive measures for these as well.
Follow Up on the Incident
1. Report the incident. Once you have administered the first aid and did all the tests, you need to report the whole incident to your supervisor, This will help boost workplace safety practices and medical waste management Boyton Beach system.
2. Test yourself for HIV a couple more times. You will need to do a few more tests for HIV (6 weeks, 3, 6, 12 months after the incident)
3. Re-test for Hepatitis C antibodies 6 weeks after the incident.