The SafePoint Trust is a charity with a global remit to improve basic healthcare provision. We believe that every person across the world has the right to ask for – and receive – a sterile and safe injection. This means that the injection is given using a new syringe each time, taken out of a packet, used once and then disposed of safely. Our goal is to educate people about injection safety, so that the billions of injections given each year are administered in the safest possible way.
We know that the use of dirty and unsterile syringes is sadly all too widespread in hospitals and medical centres, particularly in developing countries. The World Health Organisation estimates that blood-borne diseases like HIV and Hepatitis B are being widely transmitted by this practice, and that unsafe injections alone kill 1.3 million people each year. Every 24 seconds a person dies as a result of receiving an injection from an unclean syringe. These are horrifying statistics, and yet people are unaware of the extent of the problem, or often unwilling to acknowledge it even exists.
The SafePoint Trust, since its foundation in 2006, is working to ensure the adoption of Auto-Disable (AD) syringes. AD syringes are a type of syringe that can be manufactured as cheaply as standard ones, only used once, therefore stemming the spread of disease passed on in this way. Read on to find out more about what we do, how we do it – and most importantly, how you can get involved.