Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) has launched a new blood collection needle that will help to avoid needlestick injuries among healthcare workers.
The BD Vacutainer Eclipse Signal Blood Collection Needle has a safety-engineered design with single-handed activation, an integrated holder and a new flashback chamber, offering clinical staff immediate confirmation of venous access, while also reducing the potential for sharps injuries.
In the UK alone, there are 100,000 so-called ‘needlestick’ incidents every year, leaving healthcare workers at risk of contracting up to 30 potentially life-threatening blood-borne pathogens such as Hepatitis B and HIV.
The new blood collection device comes onto the market just seven months before an EU directive issued in 2010 comes into force, demanding improvements in health worker safety standards. This order specifically referred to the focal role played by safety-engineered medical devices such as syringes, needles and catheters on reducing sharps injuries.
Luis Fernandez-Inglesias, vice president of BD Diagnostics, said: “Blood collection is one of the most hazardous tasks healthcare workers perform and a recent study showed it is the procedure carrying the highest risk of needlestick injury.
“BD is committed to raising awareness of the risks faced by healthcare workers and educating and informing healthcare facilities on the precautions they can adopt, as well as developing safety-engineered devices for improving healthcare worker safety. The new BD Vacutainer Eclipse Signal Blood Collection Needle represents a new level of confidence in safety-engineered devices for venous blood collection, designed specifically with healthcare workers’ safety in mind and ease of use.”Features of the device include anti-slip ridges and thumb pad for easy, single-handed activation of the safety shield and the blood droplet reduction system has been designed to reduce blood droplet formation when the needle is removed from the vein. In addition, the needle bevel and safety shield are aligned for easy identification of the needle position for blood collection and full integration of the holder and needle reduces the risk of user-end sharps injuries and improves efficiency by reducing the number of steps in the blood collection process.