Sharps safety. Five steps for maintaining an effective program

Although most hospitals have had sharps safety programs in place for years, these programs may be out of date or may fail to address new procedures. Facilities should therefore regularly take stock of their current practices and evaluate new devices on the market. In this article, we describe a five-step process for developing, assessing, or revising a sharps safety program. Such programs are typically broad based, addressing several types of risks and the activities of multiple departments. Facilities may have well-established procedures for dealing with one of these aspects, while having few if any measures in place to address another. Consequently, the steps in the program described in this article may need to be applied in different ways to different areas within a single hospital. Yet even well-established programs require ongoing review, so these five steps are recommended regardless of how complete or effective a facility's current efforts may seem.