Always dilute chemotherapy agent vincristine and administer it by mini IV-drip bag, instead of syringe, urges the National Comprehensive Cancer Network in a new campaign.
The goal of “Just Bag It” is to prevent a rare but uniformly fatal medical error – administering vincristine to the spinal fluid. When syringes are side by side – one with vincristine for IV push, another with a chemotherapeutic agent meant for push into the spinal fluid – it is just too easy to make a mistake. When administered intrathecally, vincristine causes ascending paralysis, neurological defects, and eventually death.
Despite all the warning labels and checks, “this still happens,” Marc Stewart, MD, cochair of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Best Practices Committee, as well as medical director of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and professor of medicine at the University of Washington, said at a press conference.
Dr. Marc Stewart
Mini IV-drip bag administration will make it “virtually impossible. No physician would hook the bag up to a needle in someone’s spine” and even if they did, there wouldn’t be enough pressure in the bag to push vincristine in, he said.
The group has encouraged drip-bag delivery of vincristine for years, but only about half of hospitals have adopted the policy. The mistake happens so rarely – about 125 cases since the 1960s – “that the motivation for change is just not there.” Until somebody like NCCN calls it out in a high-profile campaign, “it’s not high on the radar screen,” Dr. Stewart said. It should be a relatively easy fix because bagging vincristine is not more costly. In general, the cost difference versus syringe “is going to be pennies,” he said.
“We challenge all medical centers, hospitals, and oncology practices around the nation and the world to implement this medication safety policy so this error never occurs again,” NCCN Chief Executive Officer Robert Carlson, MD, said in a press release. A medical oncologist, he witnessed the death of a 21-year-old patient after an intrathecal vincristine injection in 2005.
“Some health care providers may associate the use of an IV bag with a heightened risk of extravasation, but research shows that the risk of extravasation is extremely low (less than 0.05%) regardless of how vincristine is administered,” the press release noted.
Vincristine is widely used in treating patients with leukemia or lymphoma.