Chemo Safety Program Targets Systemwide Hospital Culture Shift

Efforts to improve chemotherapy safety globally should focus on systemwide change within hospitals, including leadership buy-in and culture shifts that prioritize quality and safety, according to Anu Agarwal of the American Cancer Society.

Agarwal emphasized that safe drug administration and toxicity management require coordinated action across multiple levels of the health care system. He highlighted the Chemo Safe program as one approach designed to strengthen hospital-wide practices and improve safety culture.

He explained that meaningful improvements depend on engagement from administrators, physicians, nurses and other staff, noting that broad participation is necessary to drive lasting change. The program also includes an implementation toolkit with resources and materials, such as posters, to help reinforce best practices and encourage adoption across care teams.

According to Agarwal, these types of structured, system-level interventions are essential to creating safer environments for chemotherapy administration and better managing treatment-related toxicities.

Transcript

What strategies can the global oncology community implement to ensure the infrastructure for safe drug administration and toxicity management is as targetable as the mutations themselves?

Yeah, chemotherapy safety is incredibly important. We have a program called Chemo Safe for this exact reason, and it’s designed to work at the hospital system level to drive change and improve the culture of quality and safety within the hospital. This kind of change has to happen at multiple levels to be effective. Administrators need to buy in, along with physicians, nurses and other staff. So again, it’s really about creating system-wide change.

Within that program, we also have an implementation toolkit that includes resources, posters and other materials to engage the entire hospital system and support a shift in culture. That’s key to improving the overall safety environment.