Interventions to Prevent Needle Stick Injuries Assignment 2022

Running head: INTERVENTIONS TO PREVENT NEEDLE STICK INJURIES
Interventions to prevent needle stick injuries
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

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INTERVENTIONS TO PREVENT NEEDLE STICK INJURIES
Literature review: interventions to prevent needle stick injuries
Introduction:
Needle stick and sharp injuries (NSIs) are the most occupational hazards in health care
setting, that expose health care workers to percutaneous exposure to infection. Such injury is
caused by suture or hollow-bore needles or any other sharp equipment. Transmission of many
blood borne-infections occurs through NSIs (Motaarefi et al., 2016). For example, the
transmission of hepatitis C virus (HCV), hepatitis B virus (HBV) and the human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV) occurs through NSIs which ultimately result in impaired quality
of life, incurring health care cost and poor life expectancy. The burden of NSIs, in understood
from the fact that every year large number of health care workers are exposed such blood-borne
diseases because of NSIs (Bhardwaj et al., 2014). For registered nurse too, it is a main job related
injury that has serious long-term impact on their health. As such injuries threaten physical and
psychosocial well-being of nurses, there is a need to identify best interventions that can helps to
prevent such injuries (Motaarefi et al., 2016). This literature review is focused on the research
problem of high incidence of NSIs and it aims to find the best available interventions that can
prevent NSIs.
Research question:
The main research question that will guide the literature review process and systematic
review of papers include:
For health care workers (P), what is the most effective strategy or interventions (I) compared to
no intervention (C) to prevent risk of NSIs (O) during clinical practice?

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INTERVENTIONS TO PREVENT NEEDLE STICK INJURIES
The significance of the question is that it is based on PICO (Population, intervention,
comparator and outcome) approach and it defines each of the PICO elements effectively. The
PICO elements for the questions are as follows:
Population (P): Health care workers
Intervention (I): Strategies or interventions to prevent NSI
Comparator (C): No intervention
Outcome (O): Preventing risk of NSIs
Search strategy:
The search for articles was done in CINAHL and PubMed and search terms were created
by identify phrases from the research question. The key search terms that was used to retrieved
articles from the database included ‘prevention of NSIs’, ‘intervention to prevent NSI’, ‘Nursing
staff’ and ‘health care workers. The key terms were combined with Boolean operators like
‘AND’ and ‘OR’ to get more number of papers specific to the research questions. For example,
some of the key search terms were combined in the following ways:
● Prevention of NSIs AND nursing
● Prevention of NSIs AND health care workers
● NSI interventions AND nursing
To further enhance the efficacy of the search process, advanced search filters from the
database were used to define language, publication date and types of articles to be searched. The
language for the papers were set to English, type of papers were set to ‘journal articles and the
publication date was set to ‘2011 to 2019”.

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INTERVENTIONS TO PREVENT NEEDLE STICK INJURIES
The PRISMA framework was followed to screen all the research articles and find the papers
eligible for the systematic review. All the research identified through database search were first
screened by identifying number of duplicate papers. The articles remaining after excluding
duplicates were reviewed by checking the abstract and titles. Those articles were included which
gave no idea about interventions related to NSIs. In addition, eligibility of the remaining articles
for inclusion in the literature review was done by reviewing the full text articles and identifying
whether the paper gives answer to the research question or not. The flow chart for the search
process is given in table 1. The analysis of quality and validity of the papers were done using the
CASP tool.
Table 1: Literature flow chart

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INTERVENTIONS TO PREVENT NEEDLE STICK INJURIES
Step 1: Literature search using broad key terms
(n = 80)
Step 2: Papers not meeting the
inclusion criteria by title and
abstract
(n =25 )
Step 3: Selection of papers review
by authors: Records screened
(n = 55)
Step 4: Full-text articles assessed
by authors
(n = 50 )
Step 5: Total number
of papers exploring
needle stick injuries
(n =50 )
Step 6: 45 papers excluded due to poor research
rigour
Step 7: Papers reviewed for
interventions related to NSI
(n=5)
Key findings and discussion:
Study selection:
By using the search terms as mentioned in the search strategy, 80 articles were identified

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INTERVENTIONS TO PREVENT NEEDLE STICK INJURIES
from CINAHL and PubMed. After combing all the articles and assessing for duplicates, 15
duplicate articles were removed. The remaining 65 articles were screened based on inclusion and
exclusion criteria. 40 records were excluded as these papers did not fulfill the inclusion and
exclusion criteria. Full text articles of 24 papers were then analyzed for eligibility by looking at
research design, sample type and interventions. By the use of this approach, 20 articles were
excluded and the rest five was selected for the literature review. The summary of search is given
in PRISMA flowchart in table 1.
By the review of literature using a systematic review approach, five papers were found
relevant to the research question. Out of these five papers, four of them were experiment based
studies and one was a meta-analysis. A short summary of each of the papers taken giving details
about author, methodology, participants, key findings and detailed description of key findings
has been provided in table 2. From the analysis of five papers, it has been found that many
varieties of interventions or preventive steps have been taken to prevent NSIs. These include use
of safety engineered devices (SED), educational training or preventive training to prevent NSI.
Table 2: Literature table
Author/
year/
country
Methodology Participants/
samples
Key findings Detailed description
of key findings
Grimmond
(2014)
Five
Australian
Quantitative
research by
conducting
sharp
102 sharp
containers
were samples
from 27
Most of the
sharp devices
were found to be
contaminated
The research findings
of large proportion of
naked sharps give the
indication that large