Introduction Ambulatory chemotherapy is an important and major advance in clinical oncology practice since it allows the administration of chemotherapy in the comfort of the patient's home without the assistance of a health professional by means of an elastomeric pump. However, these pumps are not without risks and can be the cause of incidents due to technical failures. Our objective is to study the technical failures of elastomeric pumps in the Cytotoxic Preparation Unit and in the patient's home, to evaluate the possible impact of these failures on the patient and on the staff and to propose measures to reduce them. Materials and methods This is a retrospective study conducted at the pharmacy of the National Institute of Oncology in Rabat. It gathered all the specific reports on elastomeric pumps issued during the period (January 2017–May 2021) by the cytotoxic preparation unit to the materiovigilance cell via a notification form. Results 205 cases of elastomeric pump materialovigilance were identified during the study period. The main technical failures were: chemotherapy product leakage (44%), flow rate anomalies (30%) and injection difficulties (20%). Following these incidents, certain actions were undertaken such as alerts sent to the supplier and letters sent to the competent health authorities. Conclusion Despite the failures that may have occurred, elastomeric pumps have revolutionized home chemotherapy delivery. They are considered reliable, consistent, easy to use and handle, and are well accepted in the population.
Objective The purpose of our study was to evaluate the contribution of an automated drug dispensing system in securing cancer chemotherapy production process at the pharmacy of the National Institute of Oncology in Rabat. Methods The failure modes and effects analysis method was applied to the chemotherapy production process in two phases: Phase 1, using an open shelf for storage then phase 2, using an automated drug dispensing system. The failure modes were defined and their criticality indexes was calculated on the basis of the likelihood of occurrence, the potential severity for the patients and/or the impact on the process and the detection probability. The criticality indexes of the two phases were prioritized and compared. Results We identified 35 failure modes for phase 1 and 37 for phase 2. The sum of criticality indexes was 5957 and 4586, respectively, for phase 1 and phase 2, corresponding to a criticality reduction of −23%. The greatest improvements concerned that the needed drug is missing during the picking, storage of potential expired drugs, and double compounding. Conclusion Our study highlighted the contribution of automated drug dispensing system in risk minimization. The use of automated drug dispensing system is a part of security improvement in chemotherapy production unit.
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