Acupuncture Hygiene: Essential Guidance
When clients enter your acupuncture practice, they want to know they are in good hands, receiving the best, most professional service. For a treatment that involves penetrating the skin, hygiene is of the utmost importance.
Follow these essential guidelines for hygiene in your practice to make sure you provide your clients with the very best duty of care.
Health and Safety Risks in Acupuncture
From needlesticks to the transmission of blood-borne disease. Acupuncturists should be vigilant against risks to health and safety at all times to keep themselves, their team members, and clients safe. Conducting a risk assessment of your practice will highlight specific areas where risk is higher than others. Here are some common risks found in an acupuncture clinic.
| Hazard | Situation | Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Direct physical contact | Administering a treatments | Wear vinyl or nitrile gloves when making contact. Wash hands before and after making contact. Ensure skin is clean, free of infection and intact. Use swabs when blotting blood. |
| Indirect physical contact | Contact with surfaces a patient has tocuhed without proper PPE | Follow cleaning and disinfecting protocols before and after seeing a patient. |
| Airborne droplets or aerosols | Interacting with someone without proper social distancing or PPE | Wear face coverings and respect social distancing where possible. |
| Needle sticking (injury and bloodborne infection risk) | Accidentally pricking oneself with a needle | Choose close-fitting disposable gloves if used. Use a field area to hold packets of needles that is easy to reach and where equipment is clearly laid out. Use sharps bins to protect against sharp waste after use. |
Best Practices for Acupuncture Hygiene
The British Acupuncture Federation’s (BAF) Code of Safe Clinical Practice outlines the fundamental guidance that acupuncturists should follow to maintain safe and hygienic practices and protocols. Here we’ve covered the basics, for the full code of practice follow the link above.
Workplace
The place where you conduct acupuncture should be a licensed space dedicated solely to the practice (or other therapeutic practices). This means that the clinic or rooms within the clinic should be suitable for professional therapy work. If you practice from home, the room in which you conduct acupuncture shouldn’t be used for anything else. This reduces the chance of potential hygiene hazards entering the acupuncture space.
The practice should have access to fresh running water, antibacterial soap, and disposable paper towels.
The treatment room must be kept clean and tidy. Contact between patients and treatment couches presents a risk of cross-contamination so these basic rules should be followed:
1. Clean and disinfect the couch after each use.
Cleaning and disinfecting product recommendations:
2. Cover the couch with disposable paper couch roll as a first layer. A fresh piece should be used for each patient and thrown in the bin after treatment.
3. When using towels (additionally to couch paper or as an alternative), make sure they are boiled or machine washed at a setting of 40-60 degrees.
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Duty of Care
The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 state that employers and employees have a ‘duty of care’ to any person that enters the business, and to each other. The duty of care involves taking reasonable steps to ensure people are safe from harm.
While carrying out treatments on patients, acupuncturists must:
- Ensure the treatment areas are clean, intact, free from irritations, wounds, and clothing.
- Keep nails short and clean. Do not wear jewellery on fingers or wrists when performing treatments.
- Dress appropriately in clean clothes and with closed cap shoes. Disposable aprons are useful for keeping your uniform or clothing clean when carrying out certain tasks like cleaning during the day.
- Refrain from giving treatment if you are unwell or suffering from an infectious condition.
- Contact your GP if you believe you are suffering from or could be suffering from a notifiable infectious disease.
Performing Acupunture
A clean field area should be established in the treatment room. This is where you will place all your equipment and tools for use during treatment. The field area should be flat and smooth, and easy to clean and disinfect.
Use the field area for packets of needles, clean cotton wool, sterile alcohol swabs, and anything else you will need to use. Never put waste, sharps bins, or waste disposal bags in the field area.
Hand hygiene is of paramount importance. Many acupuncturists prefer not to use disposable gloves in order to retain better sensation when applying needles. If this is the case hands need to be washed thoroughly before and after treatments. Find out how to wash your hands properly in our blog.
Sanitising your hands with hand sanitiser if necessary:
- Before removing needles.
- Before touching a patient if there is a chance your hands have been contaminated by handling something.
- After dealing with body fluids even when having used gloves.
If you need to handle blood or body fluids, if you choose to wear disposable gloves for other reasons, or if a patient requests for them to be used they must be well-fitting and single-use. Choose from lightweight vinyl gloves or puncture-proof nitrile gloves. We stock both in different sizes for a close fit.
Before needling, clean the skin and sterilise it. This can be done with a gentle face and skin wipe, and with a 70% alcohol swab.
Products we recommend for cleaning and sterilising the skin:
Open needle packets in the presence of the patient at the time of treatment and only ever use each needle once, even if you need to reposition a needle a new one should be used. Needles shouldn’t be placed on surfaces before or after use. They should go directly from the packet to the patient and then into a sharps bin.
Disposing of Waste
Any body fluids or items contaminated with body fluids must be treated as potentially infectious and as such, they are classed as hazardous clinical waste. Acupuncture clinics must dispose of hazardous waste properly in accordance with legislation.
Find out about what is classed as hazardous waste and how to dispose of it in our blog.
All sharps (needles of all kinds as well as any other sharp material that becomes contaminated such as broken glass after an accident) must go into a sharps bin before being put into a waste bag.
All sharps bins along with material contaminated with body fluids like cotton swabs must go into a yellow biohazard bag which should then be collected by a specialist waste disposal company. Receipts of hazardous waste collection should be kept for a minimum of two years.
Acupuncture and Covid-19
The specific measures that acupuncturists must take to protect against infection will depend on their individual risk assessments. Factors like the size and layout of your practice, how many members of staff and patients go through it each day, and the at-risk groups you come into contact with will all form part of your infection control protocol.
Some measures that acupuncture practices can put in place to slow the spread of infection are:
- Take tests regularly and ask staff to do so if they can.
- Provide access to handwashing stations and encourage staff to wash their hands more often for 20 seconds minimum. Provide access to hand sanitiser at the entrance and at other common touchpoints.
- Provide face masks for staff and patients to wear in the practice if they can. Type IIR face masks are ideal as a minimum requirement. FFP3 valved respirators are the best choice to give the wearer high protection.
Clean communal areas and disinfect touchpoints regularly, including keyboards, door handles, taps, pens, desks, chairs, and so on. Our PDI Sani-Cloth® AF Wipes (formerly known as PDI Sani-Cloth Universal Wipes) are a good choice, killing bacteria and germs without the harsh, drying effects of alcohol-based wipes.
Find out about infection control measures for acupuncturists in more detail via the British Acupuncture Council’s Covid-19 FAQs.
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