ASHP guidelines on preventing medication errors with chemotherapy and biotherapy.

The purposes of these guidelines are to define best practices for the safe use of chemotherapy and biotherapy agents and to assist practitioners in improving their medication-use systems to prevent medication errors and patient harm from these agents. Although the guidelines are intended primarily to address use of chemotherapy and biotherapy agents in cancer treatment, some recommendations may be more broadly applicable across the medication-use system. These guidelines supplement ASHP’s Guidelines on Preventing Medication Errors in Hospitals and address error prevention within diverse healthcare settings. Further, these guidelines provide updated general guidance to include a standard definition of a “medication error” and applicable aspects of recommendations from the National Coordinating Council on Medication Error Reporting and Prevention (NCC MERP). NCC MERP’s definition of a medication error is: