It’s As If We Are In A Developing Nation…

…having to reuse syringes to deliver multiple medications to multiple patients in order to save money.  This is so wrong on so many levels and Dr. Moira McKinnon is somwhow justifying this practice??  Unbelievable.  Where are the details here?  Are the syringes being autoclaved between patients?  If you inject one patient with a medication, do you rinse the syringe out and fill it with a different med…or the same one, to be given to a different patient?  If you are not autoclaving between patients, then you risk not only the possibility of injecting backwashed blood or plasma from the IV line (because IV lines DO back-up, although you may not see evidence of the back-up if the flow was started up again – the contamination is still present in the line), but also risk passing on bacteria contaminating the port of the previous patient’s line.  If anyone thinks reusing syringes to inject into IV lines is a good idea, then they are practicing bad medicine and have a poor understanding of aseptic technique.  Tell me, if the provincial government is so poor that they can’t afford syringes for hospitals, why are we giving them away by the hundreds of thousands to drug addicts at “safe injection” sites??  Oh, and if Dr. McKinnon is so comfortable with the procedure, let’s put her in a hospital, run an IV line into her for a week and use the technique on her.