Hundreds of health care workers and union activists rallied at San Francisco General Hospital yesterday to demand protection against deadly needle sticks and to denounce the nation's hospitals and medical clinics for failing to provide safer needles.
Responding to Chronicle reports that thousands of nurses, laboratory technicians and hospital housekeepers have died unnecessarily from needle injuries in the past 20 years, the protesters urged the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to pass a city ordinance banning dangerous syringes and blood-drawing devices.
"We are the ones taking care of patients," said Luisa Blue, local organizing director for the Service Employees Union International, which represents hundreds of thousands of health care workers. "Now somebody has to take care of us."
The proposed ordinance would require all medical facilities owned by or doing business with the city to use safe needle products. The ordinance would affect scores of clinics, hospices and hospitals -- including San Francisco General -- as well as medical wards in city jails and schools.
"We are asking the health care industry to stand by its women and men," Supervisor Tom Ammiano, the ordinance's sponsor, said at the rally yesterday. "Needles may be disposable, but human lives are not."
A series of Chronicle stories published earlier this week revealed that thousands of needle stick victims contract HIV, hepatitis C and other lethal infections every year -- even though needles with simple safety features that could prevent the injuries have been available for at least a decade.
Few of the needles have reached health care workers, The Chronicle found, because it is more profitable for manufacturers to sell conventional designs and less costly for medical facilities to buy them. And government watchdogs have virtually ignored the problem, failing to enact or enforce regulations that would protect health care workers.
The articles provoked a swift response from political leaders around California. "I find this a cause for great concern," wrote Assemblywoman Carole Migden, D-San Francisco, in a letter yesterday to John Howard, the state administrator who oversees Cal OSHA. Migden demanded "a list of specific steps you will take to assure prompt compliance with the state regulations (on safe needles) that you have been charged to enforce. "State regulation requiring the use of safe needles has been in effect for fully six years," Migden wrote. "In that span of time, it is difficult to fathom why your agency has inspected less than 2 percent of California hospitals to assure their compliance."
State Senator Mike Thompson, D-Santa Rosa, said yesterday that solving the needle stick problem is "an easy thing to do" through the use of safe needles. Thompson sponsored legislation in 1996 to require hospitals to use safe needles. But state hospital groups and Governor Pete Wilson's administration were overwhelmingly opposed, Thompson said, so he revised it into a statewide study of the needle stick problem.
"I was alone on this at the time," he said. "There was no support from the medical industry.
The governor's office did not respond to The Chronicle's request for comment.
Meanwhile, U.S. Representative Pete Stark, D-Fremont, stressed that "providing basic protections for nurses and other health care professionals is the least we can do for those who take care of us when we are ill."
Stark introduced a bill last October requiring all hospitals that serve Medicare patients to use safer needles.
"Legislation is now clearly needed," he said.
But health care workers threatened every day by needle sticks told the rally yesterday that they cannot wait much longer for action.
I've been really fortunate," said nurse Lynna Young, who works at a San Francisco medical clinic and has yet to suffer a stick. "But every time I give an injection or draw blood, you bet it's in the forefront of my mind."
Ellen Dayton, a nurse practitioner who worked with Young and contracted HIV and hepatitis C from a 1996 needle stick, was too ill to attend the gathering. But in a written statement read to the crowd by another nurse, she said, "We deserve to have our lives and health placed at the top of the list of economic priorities, not the bottom."
Although the demonstration occurred in front of San Francisco General, hospital epidemiologist Dr. Julie Gerberding contended that the workers' demands and Ammiano's proposed ordinance would probably have little effect at the hospital because it already purchases only safer needle devices.
A great deal of progress has been made," she said. "Every needle device that can be replaced has been replaced . . . and needle sticks have been reduced by 60 percent here.
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