Abstract
Reuters has reported that MedPro Safety Products, Inc. a developer of technologies that enable safer medication delivery and blood collection, has surveyed 262 healthcare professionals at the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc (APIC) 2011 Annual Educational Conference held in June 2011. The survey’s key findings include:
- 68% of healthcare workers do not believe that syringe needlestick injuries have been eliminated at their institutions, despite FDA, CDC, and OSHA requirements in place for more than a decade.
- 43% do not believe the safety features that prevent needlestick injury are always activated after use and prior to disposal at their institutions, and less than 40% check for activation.
- 43% are not happy or ambivalent with the current syringes used at their institutions.
In the same way that most turkeys believe Christmas may be a risky time of year for their ongoing wellbeing, the survey concludes that there is a high degree of concern among healthcare professionals about the risk of needlestick injuries from the syringes currently used by their institutions. Survey questions also focused on brands, pricing and other features, including ease of use. If only there was a company able to provide answers to the sticky problems raised…
MedPro’s products
MedPro’s blood collection product line offers a passive safety mechanism that is automatically activated, allowing clinicians to deploy it safely without adding steps to the procedure.
MedPro develops safer medication delivery (injection and infusion) and blood collection (blood collection sets and blood tube holders) systems. Unlike competitive safety needle products currently on the market, MedPro’s safety features operate without user activation, and therefore require little or no clinician training to use.
ASHP Conference
The Company will conduct a second survey at its Booth #1924 at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Midyear 2011 Clinical Meeting and Exhibition, December 4 through 8 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The survey will solicit pharmacists’ views of drug development and delivery, and how packaging issues impact workflow and patient safety. The survey will also focus on potential improvements to existing prefilled syringes and needlestick prevention technology.
Company Comments
“We gathered helpful insights from the survey of healthcare professionals at APIC,” said Bethany Denning, Director of Corporate Relations for MedPro Safety Products. “Our (forthcoming) survey at ASHP will help us learn more from pharmacists and has been structured to provide additional information on issues of specific concern to these important professionals, including the benefits of prefilled drug delivery systems. We look forward to reviewing and being guided by the results.”
Is this Marketing or Research?
It’s really difficult not to splutter; “you don’t say” when a company issues the results of a survey which concludes there is a massive demand for its products, and it would be a disservice to MedPro to do so on this occasion. That said, a little more on the methodology and independent scrutiny of the results would surely give what is no doubt good work a greater air of credibility and authority among the clinical audience to whom it is directed. As it stands we don’t know who asked the questions, how the questions were phrased or whether there were three, thirty or three hundred questions.
We also don’t know much about the population of the congress, other than it was likely to feature people predisposed to heightened interest in the subject rather than a normalised population of healthcare workers. If it was only booth visitors we could be forgiven for assuming that the audience was further predisposed to being concerned about the subject. We’d love to see the full report released and be able to adopt a scientific approach to its analysis, so perhaps the company could be encouraged to be a little more forthcoming. It’s no doubt absolutely true that there are safety issues at play here-companies like MedPro exist because of them-but adoption of solutions is much more likely to occur if the research doesn’t look quite so self-serving.
Source: Reuters, medlatest staff
published: December 5, 2011 in: Healthcare, medlatest Editorial, USA