Ontario pharmacy assistant who found chemo errors ‘not a hero,’ he says

An Ontario pharmacy assistant who discovered that chemotherapy drugs administered to more than 1,200 cancer patients in Ontario and New Brunswick were diluted says he doesnt consider himself a hero.

Its just part of the process, its part of our job, and it just happens that this check that we made had a broader impact than we certainly would have anticipated, Craig Woudsma, 28, said on Tuesday. But definitely not a hero, no.

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The pharmacy team in the small Peterborough hospital that caught the problem did not want to go public with their story initially, hospital officials said. Were not looking for glory or anything like that, Mr. Woudsma told an Ontario legislative committee investigating the drug scare. What we do is kind of the same thing day in and day out, and were there for the patients.

Mr. Woudsma, who was certified as pharmacy assistant in 2007 and started working in the hospitals oncology department in 2011, said he started asking questions when he saw the bags from Marchese Hospital Solutions required refrigeration.

Another pharmacy assistant noticed that the bags containing the drug-and-saline mixture from the previous supplier, Baxter, did not need to be refrigerated, but the new ones from Marchese Hospital Solutions did, Mr. Woudsma told the committee.

It was the first day the hospital was using the Marchese mixture, so he compared the labels on both bags, he said. He noticed that the labels on the Marchese bags did not provide the total volume or the final concentration like the Baxter labels.

He also noticed that the electronic worksheet used to calculate the dose for each patient used the final concentration indicated on the Baxter label.

It was later discovered that the bags contained too much saline, which effectively watered down the prescribed drug concentrations by up to 20 per cent. Some of the patients in Ontario and New Brunswick had been receiving the diluted drugs for as long as a year.

Mr. Woudsma said he is surprised that the problem was so widespread. But the patients should know that things will change.

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Ontario pharmacy assistant who found chemo errors ‘not a hero,’ he says