EAHP Survey 2010 on hospital pharmacy in Europe: Part 3. Production and quality assurance

Correspondence to Dr Roberto Frontini, Universitätsklinikum Leipzig, Liebigstr. 20, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany; [email protected]

Introduction

The pan-European survey of hospital pharmacy practice conducted by the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists (EAHP) is an important source of information for understanding future professional challenges and system development needs in Europe. The methodology and the background of the 2010 survey were previously described in this journal.¹ In this article we present the production and quality assurance findings.

Results

In general, the number of hospital pharmacies across Europe producing medicines for stock and for individual prescriptions has decreased substantially since 2000 (figure 1).² This is especially the case for the production of stock sterile medicines, which the 2010 survey shows to be less than half of that recorded in the 2000 survey (decreasing from 66.8% to 29.9% of pharmacies). However, the 2010 survey also recorded a 32% decrease (from 71.0% to 48.5% of pharmacies) since 2000 in pharmacy involvement in the production of individual sterile preparations. Production for all preparations is highly dependent on the size of the hospital (table 1) with the larger units recording significantly more production activity.

Table 1

 Percentage of pharmacies producing medicines for stock (n=982) and for individual prescriptions (n=988)

Production for stockProduction for individual prescriptionsHospital size (by number of beds)Sterile productsNon-sterile productsReagentsSterile productsNon-sterile ProductsTPNCytotoxicsIntravenous admixtures for all unitsIntravenous admixtures only for special units (eg, ICU)

All hospitals	30.4	49.3	16.5	48.6	65.8	24.6	43.8	2.7	8.0
1–49	0.0	7.7	0.0	7.7	7.7	0.0	15.4	0.0	0.0
50–99	0.0	11.6	2.3	9.1	22.7	2.3	11.4	0.0	0.0
100–199	5.7	22.9	4.3	15.6	37.6	9.2	12.8	1.4	2.1
200–299	12.9	37.6	8.9	27.1	50.5	9.0	23.4	0.9	2.7
300–399	21.2	44.9	12.7	41.4	62.9	16.8	33.6	2.5	1.7
400–599	31.1	50.9	13.0	50.3	74.5	20.6	48.1	2.5	5.6
600–799	27.8	49.5	12.4	57.1	72.4	25.3	51.5	1.0	9.1
800–999	45.6	61.4	15.8	64.9	80.7	40.7	62.7	6.8	11.9
1000–1499	58.8	73.9	28.6	81.5	89.9	45.7	72.4	5.2	18.1
1500–2000	66.0	85.1	48.9	91.5	95.7	51.1	78.7	8.5	23.4
>2000	73.1	86.5	50.0