THE SAFETY CASE
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.