More than 9 percent of primary care organizations and 10 percent of ambulatory surgery centers have deficiencies in their safe injection practices, according to the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Healthcare Institute for Quality Improvement's Quality Roadmap. This is the first time in the three-year history of the report that injection practices have been flagged as a top deficiency.
"Now that we have determined the prevalence of this problem, AAAHC and the AAAHC Institute are committed to raising awareness of proper injection practices and providing education to the field," Naomi Kuznets, PhD, vice president and senior director at the AAAHC, said in a statement.
The report cites newly mandated CMS reporting related to re-use of needles, syringes or multi-dose vials as one possible reason for the high rate of deficiency. The mandate may have made unsafe injection practices more visible and increased surveyor scrutiny of providers for the report.
To address the issue, the AAAHC has partnered on the CDC's One & Only Campaign, which focuses on eliminating infections linked to unsafe injection practices. The AAAHC plans to release educational resources in the form of a toolkit aimed at ambulatory providers in 2016 to supplement materials the CDC has released in conjunction with its campaign.
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