St Bernard's Hospital set to enhance services with new aseptic unit

A new aseptic unit is to be built within St Bernard’s Hospital so patients can continue to benefit from chemotherapy medication, and be able to expand to other services.

The aseptic unit will provide additional physical production capacity and improve the drug manufacturing process to meet increasing demand for aseptic services from the local community, said a statement from the GHA.

Staff will be able to continue to prepare ready-to-administer chemotherapy drugs, as well as intravenous nutrition and antibiotics.

“The new unit provides an aseptic environment of higher standards with specialist equipment and a dedicated team to provide safe and high quality injectable medications to meet the demands of our population,” said the statement.

“The unit will comply with Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) standards, and is designed to accommodate more isolator units than we currently have, to be able to increase production in the future and have as contingency too.”

Melanie Gordon, Chief Pharmacist said, ‘We are delighted to be announcing the construction of the new aseptic unit. This development is a significant step forward in our capacity to produce other aseptically pre-prepared medicines alongside the chemotherapy agents. It will allow the team to manufacture high quality products whilst also maintaining the safety of the staff working within the unit."