Areas to Focus on When Considering Sterile Compounding

In this clip, Patricia Kienle, BSPHARM, MPA, FASHP, director of Accreditation and Medication Safety for Cardinal Health in Dublin, OH discusses the different rooms that are used for compounding and how to comply with USP 797 regardless of location in sterile compounding. This video was filmed during the 2019 American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Summer Meeting in Boston, MA.

Patricia Kienle, BSPHARM, MPA, FASHP: I look at 3 different areas where sterile compounding has mixed. First of all, most of us have the IV rooms or IV labs, whatever folks call them and they can be either a compounding suite, which means you have a separate ante-room and a separate buffer room, at least 1 buffer room, or you might have a segregated compounding area, which means essentially a certified hood but not inside another sterile suite. You also have to remember those areas in health systems where ambient air is used for mixing any of the sterile compounds. So, that might be an OR, but it might be a nursing station, it might be the IDI, it might be any of the procedural areas that are there and I think that’s a place a lot of people forget that they need to identify how they can keep patients safe and comply with 797 in those areas as well.