occur in the OR, with
suture needle inci-
dents the most com-
mon injuries in surgi-
cal settings. A review
of 2018 data at my
facility reflected the
same trends: 70 percu-
taneous injuries
occurred in the OR,
with 73% sustained
from curved suture needles and 66% occurring during wound closure.
In early 2013, our facility established a program known as Job
Safety Behavioral Observation (JSBO) to review and understand
employee injuries, with sharps and suture needle injuries being cen-
tral to this work. We seemed to be doing everything right in terms of
sharps safety practices, but the numbers didn't lie. No one on our staff
intended to get stuck with a sharp, or stick someone else, but it still
happened far too frequently. Was there a missing variable in our
sharps safety equation?
Identifying the risk factors
Early work of the JSBO and ongoing trends in suture needle injuries
provided a foundation for structuring an academic quality improve-
ment project that was approved through the internal review board
process at our hospital. The aim of the project became to further
understand if sharps injuries occur because people are distracted, hur-
ried, interrupted, overwhelmed or tired.
On initial review, research was lacking on distractions and cognitive
fatigue as factors for sharps injuries. The aviation industry and its
7 2 • O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J U N E 2 0 2 0
POINT TAKEN Suture needle sticks account for most sharps injuries in the OR.
