Health & Medical

StickSafe Hospital Tray: reducing needle stick injuries

Michael Korn

StickSafe is a hospital tray that has been designed to radically reduce the risk of needle stick injury to medical workers. The device was developed by Michael Korn of RCA Industrial Design Engineering.

Needle stick injury, a common and dangerous problem for all users of medical needles, is the accidental jabbing of oneself or others with used, contaminated needles, which can lead to healthcare workers contracting blood-borne diseases e.g. HIV infection and hepatitis, from the patients they are treating.

Needle stick injury is the second most commonly reported accident in the UK National Health Service (NHS) with around 100,000 cases reported annually. The costs to the NHS have been estimated to be greater than £ 300 million.

The conventional method to make a needle safe after use is to re-sheath the used needle, i.e. push it back into its protective plastic sheath. However, it is common for needle stick accidents during re-sheathing a contaminated needle since it is easy to miss the sheath and stab oneself and as a result, re-sheathing has been banned. Used needles are therefore carried around hospital wards on open trays and taken to sharps' bins where they are disposed of while still attached to syringes.

The failure to separate needles from syringes has an impact on hospital disposal costs and yet the very process of separating needles from syringes and re-sheathing the needles often gives rise in itself to needle stick injury.

The StickSafe hospital tray has been designed to allow one handed de-sheathing and re-sheathing of contaminated needles. It also allows the medical worker to separate a contaminated and sheathed needle from the syringe safely and thus also reduces hospital disposal costs.

StickSafe is an easy to manufacture, low cost solution to a global problem that is not limited to health workers but to anyone who uses needles. The tray received an honourable mention in 2006 from the International Sharps Injury Prevention Awards.

StickSafe Ltd was formed in 2008 to commercialise the patent pending tray.

Contact StickSafe or InnovationRCA for further information.