Objective:To examine a comprehensive approach for preventing percutaneous injuries associated with phlebotomy procedures.Design and Setting:From 1993 through 1995, personnel at 10 university-affiliated hospitals enhanced surveillance and assessed underreporting of percutaneous injuries; selected, implemented, and evaluated the efficacy of phlebotomy devices with safety features (ie, engineered sharps injury prevention devices [ESIPDs]); and assessed healthcare worker satisfaction with ESIPDs. Investigators also evaluated the preventability of a subset of percutaneous injuries and conducted an audit of sharps disposal containers to quantify activation rates for devices with safety features.Results:The three selected phlebotomy devices with safety features reduced percutaneous injury rates compared with conventional devices. Activation rates varied according to ease of use, healthcare worker preference for ESIPDs, perceived “patient adverse events,” and device-specific training.Conclusions:Device-specific features and healthcare worker training and involvement in the selection of ESIPDs affect the activation rates for ESIPDs and therefore their efficacy. The implementation of ESIPDs is a useful measure in a comprehensive program to reduce percutaneous injuries associated with phlebotomy procedures.

We discuss the room temperature annealing of Floating Gate errors in Flash memories with NAND and NOR architecture after heavy-ion irradiation. We present the evolution of rough bit errors as a function of time after the exposure, examining the annealing dependence on the particle LET, cell feature size, and for Multi Level Cells, on the program level. The results are explained based on the statistical properties of the cell threshold voltage distributions before and after heavy-ion strikes

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Heavy ions typical of the space environment have energies which exceed by orders of magnitude those available at particle accelerators. In this paper we are irradiating state of the art Floating Gate memories by using a medium energy (SIRAD) and a high energy (RADEF) facilities. The corruption of stored information decreases when increasing ion energy. The proposed model deals with the broader track found for higher energy ions. Implications for testing procedures and for reliability considerations are discussed.

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