Home Health & Hospice Week

With COVID-19 vaccinations potentially becoming more common for home health and hospice providers, you should heed special instructions for vaccine materials.

Fraud surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine is a problem, and you may need to adjust your usual vaccination material habits. The HHS Office of Inspector General recently released a fraud alert warning of scams surrounding COVID-19. One of their recommendations is to “be mindful of how you dispose of COVID-19 materials such as syringes, vials, vial container boxes, vaccination record cards, and shipment or tracking records. Improper disposal of these items could be used by bad actors to commit fraud.”

The Department of Defense, in a February 2021 memo, recommends that providers: “Treat vials and packaging similarly to medical waste by placing in red sharps container; or … Deface all or safely crush materials so it cannot be reintroduced or reproduced. After the products are sufficiently defaced, then dispose with regular waste.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that expired or compromised vaccine, including some unused or diluent doses, unopened vials, expired vials, and potentially compromised vials can be returned for credit even if they must be discarded. However, open or broken vials/syringes, manufacture-filled syringes that have been vaccinated, and vaccine predrawn by the provider cannot be returned and should be discarded. Empty vaccine vials are, for the most part, not considered hazardous or pharma­ceutical waste and thus do not need to be disposed of in a biomedical waste container. Ultimately, however, you should contact your immunization program or state environmental agency for guidelines.

The general consensus from various companies that manage medical waste is that syringes should go into sharps containers.