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Friday, 20 December 2013

Precautions in Administering Vaccines

One of the most important steps for administering vaccines is the use of precautions. The person giving vaccines should wash his hands with soap, sterilizer or alcohol based waterless antiseptic. This step should be repeated every time the administrator cleans or diaper the patient. 


Except from clinic policies, the administrator who injects vaccines into the patient does not needs to wear gloves unless the administrator is personally in contact with the patient’s body fluid. But most often the patient have open lesions on the hands that’s why it should be the policy of every clinic to made it compulsory for every administrator who injects vaccines to wear gloves to decrease the risk factors. It should be acknowledged that gloves do not prevent diseases transferred from needle stick injuries. (Vaccine Administration) The administrators should use sterilize syringes and needles; the more convincing is to use disposable needles or syringes as they have no risk factor for transferring disease of one person to another.
The syringes or needles should be auto destructible. The needles which are used once should not be in the condition to use it second time. This method is used to decrease the risk for contamination of the needles or syringes.
The administrator should not mix the vaccines unless it has been allowed by the FDA. The administrator can only combine the vaccines under the condition of patient’s age and explicitly specified on the FDA approved or licensed product list. There are a few number of vaccines which can be combined that’s why the administrator should keep this in priority to not to combine the vaccines. (CDC)
In the end the method to destroy the contaminated vaccines is also one of the important points of the precautions. The method of autoclaving is one of them. This method has a definite process. In this method the syringes or needles are steamed in high temperature. The other method is incineration. In this method a temperature of 850oC is to be maintained. Now this high temperature is affordable by the normal health care centres. Only trained persons should do this process. (World Health Organization) 
References

CDC, Recommendations and Reports, January 28, 2011, retrieved from, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr6002a1.htm

Management of waste from injection activities at district level, world Health Organization, Retrieved from, http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/medicalwaste/mwinjections.pdf

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