A federal law enacted to protect health care workers from being stuck by needles has reduced the number of such injuries, decreasing the possibility for exposure to bloodborne diseases, according to research conducted by the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

The Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act (NSPA) requires employers to provide safety-engineered devices to employees who are at risk for exposure to bloodborne pathogens and to let frontline workers have a say in selecting these devices.

NSPA also mandated revisions to OSHA’s bloodborne pathogens standard, requiring employers to provide safer devices for at-risk employees, review exposure-control plans annually, and maintain logs of all injuries by sharp items. It also gave frontline workers a greater role in selecting appropriate safety devices.

To determine whether the NSPA has had an effect on the rate of needlestick injuries among hospital employees, researchers used a multihospital sharps-injury database maintained by the International Healthcare Worker Safety Center at the University of Virginia. Since 1993, a group of U.S. hospitals voluntarily contributed sharps-injury surveillance data. Researchers selected the period from 1995 through 2005, which included 23,908 injuries that occurred in 85 hospitals in 10 states. They then calculated the annual rates of injuries per 100 full-time hospital employees, as reported by the American Hospital Association."

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