"This won't hurt a bit. Just a little stick," you say before you start the IV needle. While you fib through your teeth, your patient grits his and, well, we all hate giving or getting needles. Besides administering drugs into the body, needles can cause pain, panic, injuries and infection to you and your patients.

Enter the jet injector: a kinder, gentler and safer way to insert IVs or to draw blood without the use of conventional needles. Jet injectors have been around for decades - remember those big injectors that the military used to give immunizations? - but today's smaller generation, like the one pictured on our cover, is no bigger than a VCR's remote control. As you'll see in our cover story ("10 New Anesthesia Technologies: Are They Right for You?" on page 42), jet injectors and their promise of needle-free numbing are creating a bit of a buzz. Most use high-pressure carbon monoxide to force the anesthetic under the skin. It all happens, pffsst, in a fraction of a second, so fast that the human body doesn't perceive it as an injection. The skin is numbed, and the IV is then slipped in.

Jet injectors are used once and then tossed out. The cost is less than $1 a syringe. But this technology can do more than eliminate pain, cut down on infectious waste and save time. It's considered a safer delivery system because you're reducing your reliance on needles and the chances of accidental needlesticks and the spread of diseases such as AIDS or hepatitis in your facility.

"Besides being painful, needles kill," says anesthesiologist Elemer Zsigmond, MD, 74, a professor of anesthesiology emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has been researching needle-less injections for more than 20 years. "I don't think most of us know that 1 million people a year die from needlestick injuries."

On Sept. 10, the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago celebrated its three-year anniversary as a needle-free facility. "We're starting a new era in surgery, and that is pain-free and infection-free surgery centers," says Dr. Zsigmond.

See page 30 for the debut of "Ask Caryl," an everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-operating-a-surgery-center-but-were-afraid-to-ask question-and-answer column by Caryl Serbin, RN, BSN, LHRM.