Pharmaceuticals as hospital hazards: managing the risks.

The recognition of pharmaceuticals as biologically active chemical hazards is a recent occurrence. Focusing primarily on the hazard potential of antineoplastic drugs, many hospitals have adopted the safe handling guidelines proposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to mitigate worker health risk. More recently, occupational health professionals are acknowledging that other drugs also are potentially hazardous to hospital workers and therefore require review. The approach used by one university hospital to identify other potentially hazardous drugs and to develop handling procedures for them involved assembling a multidisciplinary committee to perform drug reviews, prioritize agents for evaluation, define criteria for a "hazardous drug" determination, specify handling procedures for "hazardous drugs," and require detailed toxicologic data from hospital studies on investigational drugs.