Persönliche Schutzausrüstung

Persönliche Schutzausrüstung, usually shortened to PSA, is the equipment that stands between the person drawing blood and the blood itself. For a pharmacy the list is short and unglamorous. Single use examination gloves in the sizes the team actually needs, a gown or a coat kept for this activity, hand disinfectant within reach of the chair, and a puncture resistant container for the used Kanüle. Eye protection belongs in the risk assessment rather than in the routine tray, because a pharmacy draw rarely produces splashing.

The equipment is the employer's obligation and not the employee's. German occupational safety law requires the employer to select suitable protective equipment, to provide it and to carry the cost, and that cost may never be passed on to staff. The Biostoffverordnung approaches the same duty from the other side, since blood counts as a biological agent and the pharmacy owes a written Gefährdungsbeurteilung and a Betriebsanweisung that follows from it. Providing the material is only half of the duty. The employer also has to instruct the team before the first draw and at intervals afterwards, and then enforce use, which in practice means noticing when gloves get skipped on a busy afternoon and saying so.

Gloves are the part that goes wrong most often. A fresh pair goes on for each customer and comes off before anything else in the pharmacy is touched, including the till, the telephone and the drawer handles. Gloves are not disinfected and reused, and they do not replace hand disinfection, which happens before they go on and again after they come off. That sequence is the core of Hygiene bei der Blutentnahme, and it survives contact with a real working day only if the materials sit where the hand expects them.

So the thing that is stocked is the station rather than the room. Everything needed for one draw is laid out before the customer sits down, including the tubes in the order they will be filled and an Abwurfbehälter close enough that the used Kanüle travels a short distance and is never recapped. Recapping is the classic route to a Nadelstichverletzung, and a safety cannula only protects anyone if the mechanism is triggered at once. A venöse Blutentnahme brings more contact with blood than a capillary one, so the gown and the disposal route carry more weight there, but the glove rule itself does not change with the method.