Protecting nurses from drug exposure

While healthcare worker protection is well governed during the preparation of cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs in hospital pharmacies, is exposure risk properly mitigated throughout administration procedures for oncology nursing staff? Recent emerging evidence suggests that harm is being sustained by at least some chemotherapy nurses in UK NHS Trusts, most probably as a result of exposure to the hazardous cytotoxic drugs they are handling in their day-to-day duties. A number of robust studies from around the USA and Europe have confirmed this phenomenon1,2,3,4 with one recent study5 advising that “the occupational risks to health care workers handling these drugs in the course of their duties still need to be fully addressed.”

In order to further investigate, MindMetre, which regularly addresses and researches patient safety and healthcare worker safety issues across Europe, has examined evidence from qualitative interviews, clinical research and case studies that harm is being sustained by chemotherapy nurses as a result of exposure to hazardous chemotherapy drugs.

Anecdotal testimonies of chemotherapy nurses up and down the UK include a range of symptoms ranging from significant hair loss since working in the oncology specialism, flu-like symptoms when a particular anti-neoplastic drug was being administered to patients, along with the disappearance of these symptoms when the treatment course ended, to an unusually high incidence of miscarriages. These anecdotal reports of ill-health among chemotherapy nurses are too pronounced to be mere coincidence, and, certainly, the increased risk of nurses in oncology departments sustaining damage from cancer treatments is well documented in clinical literature.6