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Clean room established on Health Science Campus |
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Chelsea-Lynn Carey |
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Aug 3, 2007 |
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The University of Toledo Medical Center recently finished the addition of a clean room, located in the basement of the Outpatient Pharmacy.
“In essence, a clean room is a sealed system, which uses multiple varieties of air changes and filtration of the air to provide a certain federally mandated clean standard,” said Joel Tavormina, pharmacy director at the UT Medical Center.
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| Alexander Oguamanam, a pharmacy technician, mixed an injectable drug in the UT Medical Center Outpatient Pharmacys clean room. |
The clean room will be used to mix injectables, especially chemotherapy drugs. Tavormina said, “When you give a person an injectable, you pretty much bypass their biggest protective organ of the body, which is the skin … so anything that then goes through the skin has to be exquisitely clean and germ-free.”
The chemotherapy drugs are mixed in a separate part of the clean room, where there is a special hood that is used to keep the drugs sterile and the person mixing it protected, said Tavormina.
The new clean room was mandated and was paid for by the UT Medical Center’s capital budget. “On Jan. 1, 2004, the USP [United States Pharmacopeia] mandated that all health system facilities should have a clean room for making sterile products fit into categories of cleanliness,” Tavormina said.
Adding the clean room on to the current pharmacy was not an easy task and took from August 2006 to February 2007 to complete. It is located where the IV room was prior to the renovation.
Tavormina said the clean room had to meet many cleanliness requirements, including having washable walls in all areas; ceiling tiles must be sealed; recessed lighting that is sealed; and the walls, floors and most surfaces of the clean room have to be washed with a certain frequency.
All these requirements were necessary because “you’re modifying the environment to the point where you start out clean and you have mechanisms in place to keep it clean,” said Tavormina, who also mentioned that it is nearly impossible to get a particle-free individual in the room.
Inside the clean room, there are more precautions to keep out germs and other particles. These include sticky mats for people to walk on, lint-free supplies and HEPA filters. Also, those wishing to enter the clean room must wear scrubs or have a gown over their street clothes and use a hair covering and booties over their shoes.
Tavormina said, “It [the clean room] will be slightly more expensive, but it will be a marked potential improvement in patient safety.”
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