The needle-stick incident

Never think that removing a securely capped orange needle after taking ABG is safe. The least expected thing could happen which was the needle piercing past the cap without you realising it. This was the first contaminated needle stick injury that happened to me.

Suddenly, I became the patient, needing someone else to poke and take blood sample from me and yet, I still needed to take the blood sample from the involved patient. I realised that actually nobody knew the process of reporting a needle-stick injury. There's no support whatsoever. You just feel lost. The irony was, there was a flowchart of steps to take after a needle-stick injury on the main board.

Going to A&E, I was still trying so hard to console myself that the risk of catching anything from such a small wound is just 0.3% and at least I've been immunised against hepatitis B. But what about Hep C and HIV? Plus that patient was an Indonesian, status unknown.

I got my first tetanus ID jab. It was quite painful. An MO even asked me if I could clerk my own history but he was nice enough to do it for me in the end.

Transporting my own blood sample to the infectious disease unit was one of the weirdest thing that I've done. At least it only took them 3 hours to process the sample and finally, I got a phone call to confirm that everything was clear. Phew.

I don't know what have I learned from this episode as I've taken all the necessary measures of taking ABGs from whatever limited tools that we have in the hospital. We don't have the safety needle for ABG taking like in the UK. We still heparanise our 1ml or 3 mls syringes ourselves and remove the needle to cap it with a stopper before transporting it to the lab.

I think it's the hassle and lack of support that deters many of my colleagues from reporting needle-stick injuries. I hope that this won't turn into a normal occurrence for me.