Aseptic pharmacy prepares for opening
A £7million super pharmacy will open for business at Northwick Park Hospital in the New Year - and there will be no queuing at the counter.
The aseptic pharmacy will specialize in the production of parenteral nutrition and chemotherapy drugs, as well as other sterile products, which will help thousands of patients a year.
The drugs, which are given intravenously, are produced in a sterile controlled environment to avoid contamination.
The new facility will produce up to 20,000 parental nutrition bags and 35,000 chemotherapy treatments a year, and will be staffed by 35 people..
Principal pharmacists Kenny Wong and Chaitan Kerai, who helped co-design the new facility, said: “It is a big investment, but we are future-proofing ourselves given the challenge of an increasingly large elderly population and rise in cancer diagnosis.
The facility, which covers more than 400 sq meters in Level 3 of the hospital will also have capacity to supply parenteral nutrition and aseptic products for the wider North West London Integrated Care System which looks after a population of nearly two-and-a-half million people.
The hospital trust will also no longer have to outsource the production of half of all its parenteral nutrition bags to a private sector pharmaceutical company.
The facility will have some of the latest technology, including gassing isolators, a decontamination chamber, automated compounders and bespoke software.
Kenny added: “We’ll be able to produce a larger number of pharmaceutical products more quickly with the aid of new technology, which includes a large decontamination room and an automated system for producing the parenteral nutrition which is currently done by manually.”
“This complex project is a great team effort by the trust. I would like to thank the project steering group, the estates department, trust procurement team and the pharmacy team for their hard work.”