A laboratory aide was cleaning one of the gross dissection rooms where the residents work. This aide was a relatively new employee who had transferred to the department just a few days prior to the event. When she was cleaning the sink in the dissection room, she accidentally ran her thumb along the length of a dissecting knife—an injury that required 10 to 15 stitches. Since there had been other less serious accidents in this room and several previous attempts to address the safety issues had not been effective, the department completed a root cause analysis.