Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-02-11-Speech-4-014"
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"en.20100211.3.4-014"2
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"Mr President, I too would like to thank Stephen Hughes and Liz Lynne for their work on this and indeed to welcome this action, although we would like to have seen it earlier. As has been pointed out, the USA has had legislation in place since 2001. We can now see such legislation in certain parts of the European Union, and at last we are catching up, but, of course, not before many people will already have been affected by this problem.
In terms of the risk, the World Health Organisation estimates that, while 90% of exposures to this risk are in the developing world, 90% of reports about occupational infection occur in the United States and the European Union. We know that there is a major issue of under-reporting sharps injuries: estimates range between 40% and 75% and that is huge. Therefore I think we should welcome the fact that, in the social partners’ agreement, clause 11 talks about the duty to report under a no-blame culture.
But I think we also need to ask why people are not reporting. Presumably part of it is that they do not understand the risks or that they fear the consequences – not least, perhaps, to their future employment – of reporting such an injury. Indeed in some places we have reports of ineffectual follow-up, in other words, even where people do report, nothing very much happens.
Certainly they are not getting even the medical support that they need, let alone the emotional support – or indeed, in some cases, alternative employment, if it is considered that, when they have contracted something like HIV, there may be a risk to patients. We have research which shows that health workers working outside hospitals are more likely to be dissatisfied with the response of employers.
People have spoken about the scope of this action. Of course it covers the healthcare sector, and we are very pleased that the agreement covers trainees and subcontractors. I am not entirely sure whether that includes cleaning staff, and I would welcome some clarification on that. But it does not yet cover workers in other professions at risk, so we hope Member States could look at that.
The training obligations are extremely important, and I hope Member States will take this seriously: both the giving and receiving of training should be mandatory, as should induction for all new and temporary staff – because I think there is a feeling that if you train people once you never have to look at that issue again. At the moment there is a lack of training even where employers have training policies in place.
An issue was raised about the cost. There are estimates that training and preventative measures, including safer devices, account for about a third of the cost of dealing with sharps injuries. That is an important saving in cash-strapped times, as well as being an important issue both for the people concerned and employers, who may indeed find themselves at risk of legal action if they are not taking action to prevent such injuries."@en1
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