AEGiS-LT: Doctors' prickly issue: Surgical residents routinely fail to report needle injuries because it takes too much time, a study finds.

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2007. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Doctors' prickly issue: Surgical residents routinely fail to report needle injuries because it takes too much time, a study finds.

Los Angeles Times - July 2, 2007
Chelsea Martinez, Times Staff Writer, chelsea.martinez@latimes.com

DOCTORS in training put themselves at risk every time they are stuck with a needle and don't report it, and new research suggests these unreported injuries happen surprisingly often.

In a Johns Hopkins University study of nearly 700 surgical residents, 99% of those surveyed said they had experienced a needle injury some time during their five-year training. Of these, 51% of the respondents said they had not reported their most recent injury. Even when working with patients with hepatitis B, hepatitis C or HIV, 16% of the residents skipped reporting the incident.

The most common reason given was that reporting takes too much time, according to the study, which was published in the June 28 New England Journal of Medicine. And nearly 30% of the doctors surveyed said that they didn't think it would do any good to file a report. In fact, say the authors, in high-risk cases, reporting allows for immediate antiviral therapy, which can greatly reduce the chances of infection.

Dr. Martin Makary, lead author of the study and director of the Center for Surgical Outcomes Research in the university's school of medicine, acknowledges that filing an injury report is "a huge hassle - doctors are expected to spend up to an hour or more filling out forms or answering questions."

He says hospitals can do more to integrate reporting into surgery procedures so that the process becomes quick and routine.

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