EU Needlestick Directive to pass into UK Law 11 May 2013

After what seems like a never ending lead in period, May 11, 2013 is nearly here and we all need to think about what we need to do to comply with EU Council Directive 2010/32/EU, more commonly known as the EU Sharps Directive

I have been aware of this ever since it came out of Brussels in 2010 and lots of people have written lots of words about it – but I have waited till we get something concrete before joining in, and that “something concrete” came out last week.

The EU Directive will be implemented into UK Law by Health and Safety (Sharps Instruments in Healthcare) Regulations 2013 and if you employ someone using a medical sharp or if you use them yourself you need to read Health Service Information Sheet 7 (HSIS7).

I’m going to talk about this from the point of view of phlebotomy (There’s a surprise) but the regulations apply to anyone who uses a medical sharp so please feel free to share this with any doctors, dentists, nurses, med students, HCA’s etc that you know (I think the regulations probably cover chiropodists too)

‘Sharps’ are needles, blades (such as scalpels) and other medical instruments that are necessary for carrying out healthcare work and could cause an injury by cutting or pricking the skin.

The regulations only apply to people working in healthcare but I think they should form a best practice guide to anyone using a medical sharp whether in healthcare or not. So if you take blood, wherever or whenever you do it you ought to abide by them.

Don’t think “I’ll read it later” don’t flick through it, read HSIS7 and find out what it’s all about.

Download it from this link http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/hsis7.htm, and put it on your phone, or your tablet, or your laptop.

If you are an employer you’ll need to make sure that you comply with them, and if you are an employee make sure that you understand what your responsibilities are and what measures should be in place to protect you.

 When you are provided with safer sharps

 

USE THEM!!!!!!!!!!

You must be trained how to use them properly when they are introduced  – it might feel different or awkward at first but persist and practice, they are after all, primarily for your own protection

There are two other useful pages on the HSE website to help you deal with the introduction of these regulations

Sharps Injuries – What you need to know

http://www.hse.gov.uk/healthservices/needlesticks/index.htm#know

and

Sharps Injuries – What you need to do

http://www.hse.gov.uk/healthservices/needlesticks/actions.htm

If you have been trained by Phlebotomy Training Services Ltd I don’t think much in “What you need to know” will come as a surprise, but “What you need to do” needs a careful read and you need to think about the implications of it:

-       Are all the necessary risk assessments in place and up to date?

-       Have you got a phlebotomy policy in place and does it match with your risk assessment?

-       Is your needle stick injury (NSI) policy up to date and does it incorporate the new requirements in the Regulations to give the injured party access to prophylaxis?

Employers now have a duty to ensure that employees have immediate access to medical advice, to offer post exposure prophylaxis or other appropriate medical treatment, and to offer counseling if appropriate

-       Are your procedures for the disposal of clinical waste and used sharps appropriate, clearly defined, and fit for purpose?

-       Are appropriate processes in place to review all of your policies and procedures at regular intervals?

-       Can you reduce the use of medical sharps? If not you must provide and use safer sharps i.e. sharps that include an appropriate safety device.

-       Is there a safer system of working than the one you currently use?

 -       Has everyone who needs it got access to the information required by the regulations, are they aware of: the risks of a sharps injury, their relevant legal duties, what constitutes good (and bad) practice, the benefits and drawbacks of vaccination, and of the support available in the event of a NSI

-       Has appropriate training been delivered? This training must cover the correct use of safer sharps, the safe use and disposal of medical sharps, what to do in the event of a NSI and the employers arrangements for health surveillance and other procedures.

-       Is training given to new staff members?

-       Is refresher training given regularly

-       Does everyone routinely follow standard precautions for the prevention against infection with blood borne viruses.

-       Does everyone know which sharps injuries should reported to the HSE

I think that overall these regulations get the balance right and I think they will help to protect everyone from the risk of infection by a Blood Borne Virus.

If you have any comments or if you want any further information please don’t hesitate to contact me or see www.phlebotomytraining.co.uk

Summer Travels

I came home from holiday on the 16^th of May (how I love Lanzarote) and got straight back into the swing of things – this was my itinerary

19^th May            Manchester

26^th May            Glasgow

30^th May            London

9^th June            Nottingham

14^th June            Brentwood

16^th June             Southampton

21^st June            Birmingham

23^rd June            Middlesbrough

27^th June            Birmingham

1^st July                 Chatham, Kent

4^th July            Tower Hamlets, London

Things were pretty straight forward, as we were delivering our Phlebotomy Skills course until the 14^thJune when we delivered a new course for the first time – a bespoke course for the National Centre for Social Research which we did initially in Brentwood on 14^th June then again in Birmingham on the 21^st of June, with a trip to Southampton in between where we awoke to find boats parked outside our bedroom window!!

(and managed at day at the cricket to watch England beat West Indies in the first ODI)

I love developing and writing a new course – it is of course not without its challenges, but the feeling of satisfaction once it is delivered is immense.

After doing the second NATCEN course in Birmingham we had a home game – in Middlesbrough and Andrew won Jack a signed ‘Boro shirt (he’s a fan for his sins) by predicting the time of the first goal in the final of the Euros

We then delivered our new Developing Phlebotomy Skills Course for he first time to a group of doctors in a secure facility in Birmingham and they were brilliant – engaged, committed and very funny – we all had a great day.

Then it was new stuff again – delivering our phlebotomy for non-diagnostic research course to a group of lecturers and PhD students at the Chatham campus of Greenwich University, before going to a brilliant new surgery in Bethnal Green to deliver our Skills course to employees of Tower Hamlets PCT

That bought us back to Northallerton on Friday 6^th July and then we had a weekend off while our two newest tutors Steve and Jo taught at Newcastle and Liverpool respectively

While all this was going on Jayne and Sid and Massimo and Max have been doing great work in London, Birmingham, and Bristol.

I think we have got a great range of courses now and they are all accredited with the OCNNER – and we have more in the pipeline.

Nobody else offers accredited training in phlebotomy and nobody has a range of courses that are tailored to the needs of groups of individual learners in the way that we do, and I’m both very proud of and excited by that fact.

Spring, South Wales, The West Country and butterflies

It’s been a while but I’ve found time to put finger to keyboard again!!!

We went on a trip down south and west going to Cardiff, Bristol and Plymouth earlier this year, with a couple of days in a cottage in Dartmoor thrown in between. It’s a long way back up to Yorkshire from down there!

It all started the weekend of the England Wales rugby international on the Saturday and the Cardiff v Liverpool League Cup final on the Sunday. We thought Cardiff would be empty but it was wild – the city was heaving with people there to watch the sport!!

We then went on to Bristol and to Plymouth. I love going into new areas with PTS but then I enjoy training pretty much anywhere. We had tea outside one evening in Plymouth but that might have been our Summer….

Where as that lovely weather gone???

We ran our new course “Phlebotomy for non Diagnostic Research” in Loughborough University on 4th April. It is aimed specifically at PhD students and turns the Phlebotomy Skills course on it’s head ~ the written work is all done beforehand and marked and then we do the practical bits. it takes a bit of adapting to and feels really strange at times (after all I have been doing the opposite for 4 years) but I think that everyone had a good day. I know I did!

Then it was Maundy Thursday and the whole family got together in Essex for Easter

I have got to be careful what I say now but I heard something the other day that shocked me!

I was talking to someone who works for a national organization who introduced butterflies to their phlebotomists without providing them with training. As a result no one even showed the phlebotomists that the butterflies had a safety device on them, much less how to use it.

This reminded me of something else. We showed a lady how to use butterflies in connection with a job that she was doing for us the other day and once we’d shown her she said

“Oh so that’s how you do it…….. ”

and she had supposedly been taught to use them by three other people!!!

The moral of this story…. If you are using a butterfly it almost certainly has a safety device on it and you need to find out how to use it for your own protection!!

There are clips on the Greiner ones and to work the B&D ones you either have to push the black button if it has one so the needle retracts or pull back gently on the tubing to draw the needle and the wings back into the “body” of the butterfly.

If you can’t figure it out give us a call or skype us on pts.live and we’ll try and help!!

New Website, Newsletter, Dublin and Manchester

After a nearly a year of planning waiting, watching and working our new website went live in the first half January – its not quite all there yet as we have a new booking system to come but it is up and running and I am really pleased with it – I hope it is simpler to find your way around and you can now download course outlines, funding information and a DWP funding form which I hope makes thing easier for everyone.

Click here to have a look and see what you think

After a bit of a performance (Andrew nearly got us banned from using the system but that is another story) my main man for graphic design and marketing Ian Bousfield of IS Designs got our January newsletter sent out on Thursday morning, backed up with some pretty amazing analytical software

Jack and Andrew wasted the entire day watching the software work saying things like

“Look someone has opened it in Antigua”

or

“Someone has just opened it in Florida ”

or

“There that’s someone in Aukland and they have just clicked through to the website”

emails opened all over the world

Katherine was much more sensible (and so was I) but I couldn’t believe that PTS was sending emails out and having them read all over the world.

To see the newsletter yourself click here

Since my last post I have been across to Dublin again – I love the city but I don’t get much chance to see it really.

My trip tends to be drive to Holyhead – ferry (hopefully smooth) – go to the hotel, teach, sleep, teach again, catch the ferry back (again hopefully smooth) and drive home . A rough crossing wouldn’t worry me but my better half is a far from good sailor and he gets…….. grumpy……if it is rough.

The people in Ireland and lovely and I really enjoy teaching there, but then again I enjoy teaching anywhere.

We hold our Manchester courses in Media City at Salford Quays and we have been going there for a while now but it has changed an awful lot. Now the BBC have moved in it has gone from being a bit of a building site to a bustling busy place. It really is starting to be a media hub and there is always something going on and someone usually sees a person that they recognise from TV.

I’ll try and blog again before to long

Well that was 2011

We have been very busy and the year passed before I got round to telling you what has been going on!!

We have had an interesting time!!

Chris, Sue, Julie and Jason, and Michelle have moved on and we wish them all the best, but Andrew, Adam, Jayne and Sid, Katherine and Alecia have joined us,

I am pleased to say that Mass and Max are still teaching for us in London and becoming more and more popular.

We are continuing to run courses all over the country, with Jayne and Sid working across the Midlands and Adam working primarily in the North.

I am particularly looking forward to going down the South West for the first time – we are going on tour to Bristol, Plymouth and Southampton and doing three courses on consecutive weekends without coming back up to Northallerton

We’ll have a car full of equipment when we set off on our trip – that is for sure!

We have been back to Scotland and across to Dublin several times where we have met Samantha and reconnected with Jackie, an old friend of Andrew’s, and we are looking forward to working with them in 2012.

During 2011 we have been getting more and more involved in teaching phlebotomy in universities which is very exciting.

We were delighted that Katherine won the Star Radio apprentice of the year award in November and we had a great evening out at the ceremony.

Just after that we started our new venture – the opportunity for people who have completed our training to take blood from real patients in a doctor’s surgery. The first three Clinics in Darlington have been a success and we are establishing centres in Sheffield and Birmingham with more to come as 2012 develops.

Jack our business co-ordinator started taking blood for real last Friday and I think he may have caught the phlebotomy “bug”.

Best wishes for 2012 and I’ll try really hard to blog more regularly

The power of video

Where on earth did April go?  I can’t believe it’s already May, I’m so behind on my blogging, sorry for not keeping you in the loop!

As with most months, April was a really exciting month for us, but it was also a month for trying out some new things.  Something I’ve really wanted to do since I started the business was create some promotional video footage of our courses, and last month, we got the process underway.

After meeting Chris from creativefilming at a local business meeting, he came along to our Advanced Phlebotomy course in Birmingham to film me, the course as a whole, and testimonials from the students.

Even though I knew this was something I’d always wanted the business to do, I was really nervous about being filmed.  I was conscious of the camera and worried about the end result, but I needn’t have been.  Chris was tactful and just sunk into the background as I taught the course.  He and the camera ended up just being another pair of eyes, and another pair of ears to teach.

I was also a bit worried because it’s a long time since I have been critiqued during teaching, and along with being a promotional tool for the company, the video footage has given me the opportunity to examine my teaching methods, and improve them.  I believe that there is always room for improvement, and this is a different way for me to learn and gives me the chance to see what I can do better.

We started the process with the Advanced course, but we’ve got much bigger plans for our video empire.  We intend to do a similar video for the basic course, but then we hope to take these to another level, and create mini-tutorial videos exploring site selection, and tourniquet use, amongst other things, to pop on the website.

The video can be found on our website and also on our YouTube channel, so check it out, and let me know what you think!

The start of this month saw me celebrate my birthday with my family for a day at the Seaside.  I really love my job, but it was really nice to take a step back, and get away with Andrew, my daughters, their partners, and of course my Grandson.

But the rest didn’t last long.  On Saturday the 6th I spent the day in Berkshire, teaching a new aspect of our courses.  We were approached for training on obtaining bloods from the hands and feet, and though this is covered in the Advanced Course, it wasn’t covered to the extent required.  Never one to shirk a challenge, I wrote new course materials to teach this aspect of phlebotomy and it was a learning curve for me too.  All of this material will affect our Basic Course as we continue to develop that further over the coming months.

Along with creating the new course materials, the company I was working with asked me to come up with a range of protocols for them, to explore why you should and shouldn’t take bloods from hands, what the consequences and contraindications can be, and how to select a site.  Writing protocols is something I quite enjoy; I know it sounds silly, but I enjoy creating safe and comprehensive procedures that an individual can follow, so I know they’re doing everything right and in the best interests for them and their patients.

So you can see why my blogging presence wasn’t quite as I would have liked over the past few weeks.  This month is no different, I’m in London at the weekend, teaching in Stratford, at our newer East London venue, but despite still being busy, I’ll try to check back a bit more regularly.

Busy being busy…

As with most weeks (especially ones that turn into fortnights!), this one has just gone too quickly!  I’ve been so busy with work and looking after my grandson, I’ve barely had time to think, let alone write about anything, but here I am at last.

Last week I was back down in London again to teach my basic course.  After the success of the previous weeks training, I was really excited about this course.  Despite the fact I love teaching, I sometimes find the travelling difficult, and the novelty of staying in hotels soon wears off.

But that aside, I love what I do, and I wasn’t disappointed with the course.  The learners were enthusiastic, excited to be learning about phlebotomy, and they all absorbed every bit of information I gave them.  And to me that’s what teaching is about – there’s nothing nicer than passing on something you know, especially to someone so eager to take in whatever you’re teaching.  It sounds cliched, but for me as a teacher, there’s nothing nicer than seeing my students do well, and knowing that they’re going on to be brilliant phlebotomists.

Last Sunday (20th) saw myself and Andrew head to York (just a short journey!) to teach the advanced course, and we had a great day.  The advanced course covers a range of things that the basic course doesn’t – we get into cannulation, using a butterfly needle, and taking bloods from the hand, amongst other things!

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday last week saw me train up two new tutors Noura and Adam, and get all of my staff get together for a couple of training days.  I like to get everyone together every six months or so to go over what they already know, make sure they’re comfortable with what they’re doing when they are teaching or assisting with the technical side of things, and just to make sure that they’re all happy with their work.

Looking after my staff is just as important to me as ensuring I send the best phlebotomists out into the world.  As well as that though, a huge part of our accreditation with the Open College Network is ensuring that all of our training is standardised and our regular meetings mean that we keep those protocols of standardisation fresh in our minds, so we can all teach the same course to the same high level.

Our USP is the fact that we are accredited by an educational body.  When I initally applied for the accreditation from the OCN, I knew that standardisation was important, but it wasn’t such an issue when I was a one man band.  I knew that I taught every course exactly the same, every time I did it.  But as I began to take on more tutors, it became more imperative to have a structured, formalised training schedule in place for my staff to make sure that we were giving every student the same tools to enter the workplace.

If you’ve completed our basic course, you’ll know that we ask you all to complete a course evaluation, and this is one of the many tools we use for this training.  The evaluation highlights any areas where we, as a team, need to sharpen up our training.  I’ve been teaching for years now, but there is always chance to improve, and the evaluations help me to learn as much as they help me to train the tutors.

We’ve also been tweaking the lesson plans recently, and every tutor is now familiar with this, and we’re rolling it out across every single course that we teach.  This means that I know every course is taught to the same high standard, and our students know that whichever course they go on, it’s going to be taught to the highest possible standard, and that in turn means that we keep that unique accreditation from the OCN.

On Friday, my husband acted as the auctioneer for a former student of ours who is involved in fundraising for Muscular Dystrophy.  There are 10 ‘warriors’ who are climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in September and our former student Justin will be walking 150 miles across the Saharan desert in the ‘Marathon des Sables’ from Thursday.  It was lovely watching my husband doing what he’s passionate about, but he’s been struck by a bit of a virus this last week, so he was a bit hoarse!  It’s a great cause and it was brilliant to be involved and support one of our former students in such a challenge.  If you want to see how you can help, or learn more about the challenges, you can visit http://www.drjustinroberts.co.uk.

This week holds business as usual, with a well needed weekend at home for myself and most of my tutors.  Unusually, there’s just one course running this weekend, but it’s a sell out in London with Sue and Massimo.  If you’re going, I hope you have a great time, and good luck!  Feel free to let us know at the office how you get on!