Have you reported each needlestick injury?

[ChristyMNOP]

And gotten tested? I'm just curious. Some people seem more complacent than others and I just wonder what more seasoned nurses do. For the record I've had two since becoming a nurse in August, one with urine (drawing up from a foley for a sample) and one with an insulin needle that went through the sq of a very thin patient.

[HopeItWorksDNP]

Have found out on a couple of occasions while drawing up meds, blunt needles aren't too blunt to stick in my finger. Nope, don't report the clean sticks. Just stick on a band-aid and back to work.

Had a lab tech stick me with a dirty needle attached to a vacutainer full of Hep C+ blood. And yep, that one got reported. Pt was known IV drug user. Scared to death for a while. But was tested off and on for a year and everything came back fine. Was on Combivir(I think) until his HIV status was known. Not a real pleasant drug, but I figure the AIDS meds aren't either, so I put up with the nausea for a couple of days. No big deal. Company paid for Phenergan too and I stayed home while waiting for the results.

[DeLana_RN, BSN, RN]

I've had one dirty needlestick (a few clean ones) when a dialysis pt moved his arm when I gave him the SQ lidocaine injection. Dialysis pts are at high risk for HIV and hep so I opted for the post-exposure prophylaxis meds (which did not make me sick. I stopped after a week when the source pt's labs came back negative).

The dialysis clinic where I worked for years had no luer locks - everything was sharps. We had to give our meds by sticking needles into a port in a blood line! Never mind the blood-filled 15-ga. fistula needles. But I had no other exposures (always treated a needle like a loaded gun!)

Please report all your needle sticks. There shouldn't be many - hospitals are much safer now, needleless systems are the norm - but chances are, it will happen to all of us sooner or later.

DeLana

P.S. I don't report clean needle sticks, I've had very few.