Does anyone allow or have a placement for a volunteer to deliver medications (specifically chemotherapy). 

Our outpatient oncology volunteers along with oncology nurses would like to pick up and deliver chemotherapy drug to department.  VP Patient Care Services has concern related to "what If''s" What if there is a spill or what if the volunteer gets medication on themselves, etc. 

Common sense is telling me if the volunteer is trained by Pharmacy and Nursing, training signed off on and then given competency annually along with evaluation it would be fine.  Fine with safety and fine with Joint Commission. 

I need successful examples to provide success rate with those at my hospital.  Hope to hear many succesful stories from each of you. 

We have volunteers that work in our Pharmacy Department and part of what they do is deliver chemotherapy drugs to our infusion center.  They have been in place for several years and have enabled our patients to get medications quickly and of course free up staff time to do other things then make trips to the pharmacy.   Christina Brown wrote:

Does anyone allow or have a placement for a volunteer to deliver medications (specifically chemotherapy). 

Our outpatient oncology volunteers along with oncology nurses would like to pick up and deliver chemotherapy drug to department.  VP Patient Care Services has concern related to "what If''s" What if there is a spill or what if the volunteer gets medication on themselves, etc. 

Common sense is telling me if the volunteer is trained by Pharmacy and Nursing, training signed off on and then given competency annually along with evaluation it would be fine.  Fine with safety and fine with Joint Commission. 

I need successful examples to provide success rate with those at my hospital.  Hope to hear many succesful stories from each of you.