Requesting Help...turn around times for chemotherapy

[ChrisF]

I am hoping that the oncology community can help me. I am in need of information regarding the turn around times for receiving chemotherapy. I am interested in the amount of time it takes pharmacy to deliver the medication from the time it is faxed to them. Can my fellow oncology nurses please share this information with me? We are having issues with excessive times to receive the chemo from pharmacy and this is with both outpatient chemo and inpatient chemo. We are trying to streamline the process so we can receive our medication safely but in a timely manner.

Can you please include the size of the facility you work at? I want to make sure I am comparing facilities fairly.

If you have a great system for requesting your medications, can you please share?

Chris

[bottomsup]

I work in an 18 chair outpatient facility. The turnaround time can vary based upon patient load as well as who the pharmacist is on a particular day. Generally speaking, we have our pre-meds up within 5-10 minutes and the chemo back in approximately 15-20 minutes. However, there are some pharmacists who will mix everything they have to mix and bring it out all at once for 3 - 5 patients, delaying the earliest patients by as much as 30-45 minutes. This is very frustrating to the nurses. We are fortunate that we don't have to deal with faxing orders; the pharmacists are available to us and can expedite when we need them to.