Injecting-related injury and disease among clients of a supervised injecting facility

The extent of injection site infection in injecting drug users: findings from a national surveillance study

“…The high prevalence of self-reported injection site infections found in this study, supports previous finding from England [8] and also elsewhere [3][4][5][6][7]. The costs associated with injection site infections are considerable, with conservative estimates for England suggesting total costs of at least £15.5-19.5 million per annum, but possibly as high as £47 million in 2006.…”

“…These infections can be serious, requiring costly in-patient intervention and can also lead to death [1,2]. The prevalence of recent or current skin and soft tissue infections in IDUs has been reported to be one in ten in Vancouver and Sydney [3,4] ; however, other studies from North America and in Europe indicate prevalence can be as high as one in three [5][6][7][8]. In North America these infections are the most common diagnoses in IDUs presenting to emergency departments [9,10].…”

“…Higher levels of these infections have also been reported to be associated with environmental factors, including poor housing and homelessness [3,4,13], and with gender [3,4,8,14] and source of income [4].…”

Not in the vein: ‘missed hits’, subcutaneous and intramuscular injections and associated harms among people who inject psychoactive drugs in Bristol, United Kingdom

“…The finding that symptoms of injection site infections and injuries were associated with reporting a 'missed hit', and that these symptoms became more common as the frequency of Findings from studies that have looked at both injection site infections and injuries and injection practice suggest that a range of factors are associated with the occurrence of these problems, and many of these factors indicate that both poor injecting technique and hygiene probably play an important role in the development of these largely avoidable harms (Hope, Kimber, Hickman, Vickerman, & Ncube, 2008;Salmon, Dwyer, Jauncey, van Beek, Topp, & Maher, 2009;Hope, Cullen, Croxford, Parry, & Ncube, 2014). They also indicate that the considerable harm caused by these infections and injuries, and the associated costs, can be amplified by delays in seeking healthcare (Marks, et al, 2013;.…”

“…First, bivariate associations between reporting a 'missed hit' and demographic characteristics, environmental factors, the drugs used, and injecting practices were examined using the χ 2 test. The environmental, drug use and injecting practice variables used in the analyses were for factors that had been shown in previous studies of either injecting risk practice or bacterial infections among people who inject drugs to be related to those outcomes (Hickman, et al, 2007;Hope, Kimber, Hickman, Vickerman, & Ncube, 2008;Salmon, Dwyer, Jauncey, van Beek, Topp, & Maher, 2009). Those characteristics found to be associated in the bivariate analyses were entered using the forward stepwise procedure in SPSS into a logistic regression model with inclusion assessed using the likelihood ratio (with the stepwise probability for inclusion of 0.05 and exclusion of 0.1).…”