Cytotoxic drug: towards safer chemotherapy practices.

ABSTRACT

Health care is nearly 10 years behind other industries in its efforts to reduce the errors. Medication error may be nobody's baby, but when it happens, it could well turn out to be everyone's worry and the reasons given for medication error range from silly to the downright serious. The anticancer drugs are known to be mutagenic, teratogenic and carcinogenic, so extra precaution should be taken while storing, diluting, administering the drugs and disposing the waste. The objectives of this article are to define the standards for using cancer chemotherapy in hospitals; to tackle any spillage of drug and how to dispose of the waste of anticancer drugs. This could be beneficial to any hospital where chemotherapy is given without any defined standard operating procedure. The information furnished in this article is collected from the mentioned references and also from websites- The American Cancer Society Cancer Facts and Figures 2002, www.cancer.org and www.cancersourceRN.com.