Compounding Hazardous Drugs

“We need to just constantly be reinforcing the fact that we’re handling substances that are known human carcinogens; our behaviors have a huge impact on the risk of exposure.”

“So the risk to handling hazardous drugs, it’s not like touching a hot object where you can feel the heat or get a burn. I think that by calling these toxic substances drugs, we look at them from a health care professional and even a patient’s perspective: drugs make you better, they don’t harm you. I think that we really need to embrace these standards a little more and believe them and not be so skeptical.”

“This is a little bit different. It’s not as cut and dry evidence as we see in other clinical studies, because it’s something that affects us long term. So something that happens to us today, whether it’s an acute exposure or whether it’s exposure over a long period of time with low doses of chemo or other hazardous drugs, we’re not going to be able to tell right away what it is. So the fact that you don’t notice anything different in yourself, first of all, you’re lucky if that’s the case. And second of all, it doesn’t tell the whole story. We need to know what that whole story is.”