An important role for hospital pharmacy is to provide injectable drugs in ready to administer containers which are prepared in a pharmacy aseptic facility and supplied to wards either for individual patients or batch prepared as ward stock. The latter method is clearly far more efficient and less demanding on service provision and personnel, and is becoming therefore the favoured method. However, this requires that first, products are prepared under strict aseptic conditions, to remove the microbiological risks associated with the preparation of injections in uncontrolled environments and second, the ability to assign extended shelf lives to such pharmacy prepared products. Unfortunately, in general, pharmaceutical manufacturers are unable to help in this …

Correspondence to Professor M Allwood ,16 Rectory Lane, Breadsall, Derby, DE21 5LL, UK; m.c.allwood{at}derby.ac.uk