The BD Safety Conversion Initiative outlines five steps to safety: Understand Assess Review Implement Measure
The steps are designed to help guide you through the safety process explaining what you need to do to make your institution as safe as possible.

		Understand Before any safety actions within your facility occur, you need to develop a comprehensive understanding about the changing sharps sharps environment.  BD in Canada will assist you in establishing a multi-disciplinary team to research and gather the necessary information.  This team can then assume responsibility for guiding and directing your overall safety initiative.
		Assess By assessing your institution's current sharps safety policies and practices, you can identify areas of greatest risk.  Based on this self-assessment, priorities for enacting safety measures can be established.
		Review After you have identified the areas for improvement, you will be ready to explore and evaluate the potential solutions, including the range of commercially available safety-engineered medical devices to meet your facility's needs.
		Implement Once the first three steps are completed, the new processes and products can be put into place.  In order to best facilitate implementation, healthcare workers should be trained on the correct usage of devices, and criteria should be established to ensure both quality and patient care and healthcare worker safety.
		Measure To ensure success and to promote continuous improvement, steps should be taken to measure your program's results.

BD can help guide you through this process by acting as a consultant and by providing support tools to help get you through each step.  For more information, please email firstin_safety@bd.com or contact us directly.