Officials in the MedStar Health system’s eight Baltimore/Washington area hospitals are crafting a systemwide program to ensure the proper disposal of the thousands of pharmaceuticals from antibiotics to chemotherapy drugs.
“Each hospital has been trying to manage the pharmaceuticals independently,” said Jerry Adams, MedStar’s director of environmental and safety compliance.
But officials said the timing was right to coordinate all the hospitals under a single program.
The organization plans to have a company assess the list of pharmaceuticals to determine which are regulated, hazardous and so-called “gray pharmaceuticals,” unregulated ones that could still be toxic. Officials are finalizing the contractor selection, and they plan to have most of the program in place by the end of the year.
This also will save MedStar money, Adams said. Officials were unable to estimate how much would be saved or how much is spent now, because the amount and kind of drugs varies among each hospital.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has started studying the disposal of unused pharmaceuticals from hospitals, long-term care facilities and veterinary hospitals and is surveying a sample of facilities on the disposal methods to inform possible uniform regulations.
Pharmaceuticals that aren’t expired can be returned to the distributor, Adams said. But mostly, the drugs are incinerated, he said.
“Because of the complexity of the chemical compounds, incineration is the best way to destroy them,” he said, adding the residual ash is then put in environmentally
Adams said he would prefer to find other ways to dispose of the pharmaceuticals, but incineration is the common practice and the easiest way to ensure they are destroyed.
Complicated regulations from various state and federal agencies dictate medication disposal, said Vivienne Stearns-Elliott, spokeswoman for St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson.
For example, chemotherapy waste is considered hazardous, so medical center officials use specially labeled and dated bins to collect the waste, she said. This is then turned over to a hazardous waste company.
At MedStar’s Good Samaritan Hospital in Baltimore, pharmacist Andrew Glorioso recently donned a cap, booties, gloves and a fiber-free gown before demonstrating how to dispose of chemotherapy drugs.
He carefully removed the medications in a negative pressure room before sealing it in a plastic bag and dropping it in a yellow bin.
Proper disposal prevents the pharmaceuticals from getting into the drinking water, Adams said.
“Hopefully we will see end results and see the levels [of pharmaceuticals in the water] are going down,” he said.
