Medical educators in Alberta are questioning statements by the province's acting chief medical officer of health that reusing syringes by injecting them into multiple intravenous tubes was common practice in recent years.

"Probably common until about sometime around the year 2000," Dr. Gerry Predy said on CBC Radio's Edmonton AM on Tuesday. "We're just trying to review all the documentation guidelines that were issued back then to see when exactly the practice changed."

On Monday, the province announced almost 2,700 former endoscopy and dental surgery patients at the hospital in High Prairie, Alta., would need to be tested for HIV, and hepatitis B and C, after it was revealed nurses at the hospital had been reusing syringes on IV lines for years.

Dr. Geoff Taylor, director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alberta, helped draft national guidelines on syringe use that were published in 1994.

Taylor told CBC News that medical professionals have known for decades that reusing syringes in any circumstance should not be done.

"I would say for the better part of 20 years this has been known to be a hazardous practice and has been specifically recommended not to be performed," Taylor said Tuesday.

Anita Molzahn, dean of nursing at the University of Alberta, said she has never seen syringe reused for IV lines in a hospital or taught to students in her 30-year career.

"I can only speak for what I teach myself, what I've seen others teach, what's in textbooks. I've never seen advocacy of multiple uses of the same syringe," she said.

"In nursing education programs, we have never taught students to fill one syringe that would be used for multiple purposes. Students, nurses, are consistently taught to use a single syringe for a single patient for a single drug, and those syringes are not reused."

One of Molzahn's colleagues in the school of nursing at the University of Alberta agrees.

"This is been something that I have never seen in my lifetime, and nor would I have never expected it," Donna Wilson, a professor who has taught students for 20 years and a still-practising nurse, said of the reuse of syringes for IV lines.

On Edmonton AM on Wednesday, Wilson said the administration of medication through an IV line is an advanced skill that is not taught in undergraduate nursing programs.

"This is often a skill often only intensive-care nurses can do, emergency nurses or outpatient operating room nurses can do, after they've taken a special course. It's a delegated skill," Wilson said.

The procedure can usually only be performed when another health-care professional like a doctor or dentist is in the room, according to Wilson.

The professional associations of all people involved in this case will likely review it, Wilson said. If people were found practising contrary to accepted standards, Wilson said, they could receive sanctions or education programs.

Infection isn't the only risk involved in reusing a syringe for an IV line, Wilson said. It could create the potential for an overdose, which is another reason the practice would never be allowed.

"If you've got two or three doses of medication in a syringe ... if you're a little tired or a little distracted, you give two doses to one person, or three doses," she said.

Alberta Health Services will be contacting people who will need blood tests.

With files from John Archer