About 22.15% of nursing workers had at least one exposure to NSIs in last year, 46.2% during last 5 years, and 56.96% during professional life.
Lotfi and Gashtasbi studied 90 nurses, midwives, physicians, laboratory technicians, operation technicians, nurse aids, and anesthesia personnel in Astara and observed that 67% of personnel had at least one needle stick injury in the last year. Only 20% of them had not any injury from needle stick during entire work career.12 The prevalence of NSIs in this study was higher than our research.
Nasiri et al performed a research on 352 staff of educational and non-educational hospitals of Mazandaran province in 2003-2005. The results showed that 75.6% of staff experienced infective and blood borne pathogens from a patient that has infection at least once. The most common damage (72.6%) was due to syringes.13 The main source of NSIs in this study was similar to our research but prevalence of NSI was higher.
Aghadoost et al studied 678 students and staff of educational-medical centers of Kashan University of Medical Sciences. Ninety four percent of participants and 100% of emergency nurses, operation room technicians, and laboratory technicians reported at least one episode of blood exposure in their professional life. Rate of blood exposure via needle stick was 58.2%. The highest rate of blood exposure (31.6% of all injuring procedures) was related to injection and the most common device resulted to NSIs (37.5% of all injuring devices) was needle used for injections.14 The main source of NSIs in this study was similar to our research but prevalence of NSI was higher.
Mantel et al surveyed the staff of 120 health facilities of Syrian Arab Republic in 2007 and showed that 14% of the staff reported needle-stick injuries in the previous 12 months.15 The prevalence of NSIs in this study was less than our research.
In our study, 56.96% of participants had at least one exposure to NSIs during their professional life and 22.15% were exposed to NSIs during last year. The NSIs in nursing workers of this hospital were significantly less than similar studies in Iran. Injection was the most common activity led to injuries similar to previous researches.