Nearly 400 hospitals commit to safer needle devices

The American Nurse,November/December 1997

Lynda Arnold campaign has far-reaching effect on health care community

In less than a year and a half, Lynda Arnold, RN, has significantly impacted health care worker safety in the United States. Since she launched her Campaign for Health Care Worker Safety in February 1996, nearly 400 hospitals have signed written commitments to implement safety blood-drawing devices and IV catheters.

What has turned into a national movement started as a personal crusade for Arnold, who contracted HIV after sustaining a needlestick while removing a catheter needle from a patient's vein. Even though Arnold, 23 at the time, had worn latex gloves and complied with all the recommended precautions, she still became infected.

As of two years ago, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last released statistics on occupational HIV infection rates, Arnold was one of 133 health care workers who had been infected in this manner. The numbers today are believed to be much higher given that every year in the United States, more than 800,000 needlesticks occur.

Arnold and other occupational safety and health experts blame unsafe needle devices for this deadly trend. In the majority of cases, Arnold reports, health care workers contracted HIV from blood-drawing devices or intravenous catheter needles. She notes that safer needle devices are available and maintains that most of the needlesticks resulting in HIV infection are preventable if hospitals adopt safer needle devices.

To that end, the Campaign for Health Care Worker Safety has worked to contact every health care facility in the country to ask that they sign a commitment to implement protective blood drawing devices and IV catheters within one year of their sign-on date. Largely due to Arnold's tireless work over the past 18 months, nearly 400 hospitals have joined the campaign; 11 have declined. Making good on her promise to alert the public to the results of the campaign, she has published lists of both the hospitals signing the commitment and those who haven't.

An even more significant result of Arnold's campaign is the change in attitude she's encountered. "At first, I felt they didn't understand," she says of the nursing groups and hospital staff she spoke to in the early days of the campaign. In the first quarter of 1997 alone, she has spoken to 25 groups. "Now that the campaign has made it into hospitals, I feel they're much more receptive to my message."

The campaign is about to take the next step in raising the awareness of the health care community, as well as the general public, with a documentary this summer and a book due to be published early next year. The documentary, while focusing on Arnold's story, discusses universal precautions and is aimed at hospitals, nursing schools, physicians' offices and other health care facilities. ANA President Beverly Malone, PhD, RN, FAAN, and ANA Occupational Safety and Health Specialist Susan Wilburn, MPH, RN, also are featured in the documentary, which will be offered for sale in July.

"The ANA is committed to preventing this type of transmission and appeals to the nation's health care facilities to purchase only those medical devices known to reduce the risk of exposure to HIV, hepatitis and other blood-borne pathogens," Malone states. She notes that the ANA's House of Delegates passed a resolution in 1996 supporting Arnold's campaign. "The use of safer needle devices will provide increased protection for the nation's health care workers and the American public."

The book is aimed more at the general public and will tell more of Arnold's story. "In both [the documentary and the book] we sought to be very inclusive of the AIDS community," Arnold says, adding that the documentary can be used in outpatient settings.

For more information about the Campaign for Health Care Worker Safety, visit the campaign's website: www.healthcaresafety.com or call (717) 299-0228.

Return to the ANA Occupational Safety & Health Homepage.

Return to the Safer Needles Save Lives page.