Remembering Our Small Beginnings

Reflections of Our Origins with Allan Perceval

As we celebrate our 40 years in business, there is some nostalgia looking back and seeing the historical milestones which have inspired and informed our present. We have all come in at different points (and ages, and countries) in this 40-year timeline; for myself personally I have been privileged to watch the journey unfold since 1998, twelve years after Dan founded the business, and yet feel that all these years later I am still learning more about the remarkable journey this business has navigated across the last four decades. 

Last month I was privileged to spend some time with Allan Perceval, the bacteriologist who first ignited Dan’s passion for needlestick injury intervention. Allan and his wife, Louise, came to our offices in Melbourne, Australia to share some early memories of the business and how the Daniels origin story played such a pivotal role in their lives.

In 1986 Allan was the Director of Microbiology and Infection Control at the Alfred hospital, he had a degree in Chemistry and Bacteriology and was working on a PHD for a soap that would kill MRSA against the backdrop of a time where hospital-acquired infections were common and often deadly. As he would recall, his interest in sharps injuries was ignited by the AIDS virus – it was spreading rapidly throughout the world and at the time, it was most often fatal.

While the initial onslaught of the AIDS virus was accompanied with rumors and conflicting opinions that confused the medical community and public alike, it was soon recognised by informed scientists and epidemiologists that merely being in contact with blood did not always produce AIDS or HIV; an adequate amount of infected blood had to enter the body tissues to have a chance of transmission. In a healthcare setting, this meant that needles, scalpel blades, or stitch cutters, had to transmit sufficient blood into the tissues to get infected.

When we think of needlestick injuries, our mind goes first to clinicians and patients, very rarely to EVS or housekeeping. As Allan would recall, if an injury occurred during a patient procedure, it was possible to know the source of the blood on the needle, whereas if a needle was encountered by someone interacting with linen or rubbish downstream, the source of the possible blood was unknown, leading to a long wait for symptoms to show.

Raised in a small country town, in his youth Allan had a job at the local butcher shop and, as he would recall, “I never saw the butcher’s knife anywhere other than in the butchers’ hand or in a scabbard on his belt… it was never out of the butchers’ control whilst uncovered”. This recollection of his youth would become the impetus for Allan’s first innovation – 250 scabbards strategically placed around the wards and theaters at the Alfred Hospital for the collection of used sharps. 30 inches long with a plug in one end and a collar and screw cap at the other with a 2-inch hole for sharps disposal, these cylindrical tubes were installed on brackets or underneath a round hole drilled into ward benches where sharps were generated.

This was the first known reusable containment solution for clinical sharps at the time.

And… this is the start of the Daniels story.

250 scabbards were collecting sharps daily at the Alfred Hospital, but as reusable vessels – they needed to not only be emptied, but washed and thoroughly decontaminated.

Meeting Allan and talking to him about different moments in his career, it became abundantly clear that Allan is a salt-of-the-earth problem solver – throughout his life he has taken what is readily available and applied an innovative mindset to drive a practical outcome. “My idea was to buy a secondhand upright clothes washing machine, remove the center agitator replacing it with a 4-inch wire brush. I was going to relocate the rinse water nozzle to squirt water up the spindle into the brush.”

Enter, the quest for a secondhand upright clothes washing machine…

First established in 1966, The Trading Post, is one of Australia’s oldest classifieds allowing buyers and sellers to trade vehicles, caravans, pets and general household items across the country. In 1986 (unlike its digital equivalent today) it was a physical newspaper featuring text-only ads; one of which was a black and white advertisement for a secondhand upright clothes washing machine for $45. The man behind the advertisement – Dan Daniels.

Allan would later point out that the $45 was an inflated price! But he was captivated by the enthusiasm of the young man who he met conducting the sale at his parents’ St Kilda hotel in Melbourne and offered to personally deliver the washing machine to Allan’s factory.

The next part of the story is a familiar one to many of us who have been in Dan’s orbit for many years. So passionate was Dan about the opportunities he saw so clearly after hearing Allan’s story… he rang Allan that same evening and shared his vision for a sharps container company, refusing in any way to be discouraged or dissuaded by a rebuttal, for over an hour… to the point that Allan simply could not say no.

I asked Allan how and when he recognised the unique qualities in Dan that have undergirded the success of the company. “Almost immediately I was impressed with his enthusiasm and business acumen. When I met him, he had already turned the occupancy of his father’s hotel around with a perceptive understanding of the travel needs of his Japanese clientele. He invested in a reception center with no fear of risk. Whenever we would drive into the city he would blithely drive to the front of the building we were visiting and would find a carpark right out front. He had no fear and trusted implicitly in his beliefs. His counsel to me was ‘You won’t find if you don’t believe.!’”

Allan reflected that Dan had vision that went beyond the scope of his own worldview. Almost immediately he saw possibilities that were invisible to everyone else, but still honored the core imperative of Allan’s infection control vision. “Meeting Dan was preordained; an ideas man and a master businessman with a risk profile the exact opposite to mine. However more than this, Dan is true, honest and generous, with loyal respect for everyone he meets and a true believer of the religion he follows.”

I feel very honored to have met the man that provoked Dan Daniels to take up the mission that we all work towards – making healthcare safer. Allan Perceval took the first step; he adopted a cause that was outside of his remit – he saw an opportunity that would help humanity, he utilised what was within his hands, and he acted… and that action created a chain reaction that has reverberated impact around the world.

In honour of the man who catalytically inspired the vision that is today Daniels Health… Allan Perceval.