Can Pharmacy Cleanrooms Survive Power Loss?

By Adam West, Environmental Monitoring and Training Specialist at CriticalPoint

At some point in your sterile compounding career, you will experience an unexpected interruption in compounding activity. The primary cause is likely a sudden power loss due to weather or some other circumstance. Whatever the cause may be, I’d like to take a moment and share my thoughts on being prepared when the lights go off and the importance of knowing what to do when they come back on. 

Can your sterile compounding environments survive power loss?

In reality, the pharmacy cleanroom will return to a proper state of control eventually. But the challenge is knowing when the room is back to normal operating conditions and how. If you’ve experienced a facility power loss, then you know this can be not only frustrating but also a stressful event for everyone and everything. There are so many moving parts that go into sterile compounding on a good day. Then an unexpected power loss happens, and everything goes out the window. But what if you could be prepared for an unexpected power loss?  

How can you be prepared for power loss? 

There are a number of options that can provide scientific data to support the difficult decisions you may have to make after a power loss occurs. Routine certification (every 6 months during operating conditions) confirms the state of control (through specific parameters of engineering design) for an environment suitable for sterile compounding. Essentially, these are our primary and secondary engineering controls (cleanroom and ISO 5 devices). But what happens if these engineering controls shut down unexpectedly? Do they come back online with the same parameter design or does some set point reset and the whole balance is disrupted? In my opinion, you need to know the answers to these questions. And operationally, you’ll likely have a thousand more questions to answer from a pharmacy workflow perspective that is based primarily on, “How will I continue patient care?” Read more >