Baxter Reviews

I really don’t know where to start here. The place is an absolute joke. You’re expected to work long hours I’ve worked 7:30 to 11pm on many occasions and was expected to come in for 7:30 the next morning too. With no break from 4pm onwards! You’re treated appallingly by management who skip out the door at 3/4 pm while you’re expected to stay until 11pm! I believe the product they make is unsafe not because the people that work there don’t care, they do but the long hours leads to mistakes especially when sitting on an isolator compounding without breaks for hours on end which I believe aren’t picked up. There’s so much opportunity to make a mistake that would never be picked up due to the set up of your workstation in the isolator. I worked in a similar company before moving to Baxter and the differences are staggering. In my previous job we had to get specific training to work with chemo, I had to know everything about the different drugs, there interactions with other drugs, their stability, their uses, how to handle them properly etc While in Baxter you were not trained on any of this. I’ve watched people shake vials of certain reconstituted drugs violently which destroys the active ingredient hence making the drug ineffective for the patient that was to receive it! I brought this to the attention of management and their response, oh we didn’t know those drugs had to be handled in that way. They have no idea about the products they manufacture which just shocked me. The different chemo drugs come in vials, so particularly potent ones, are wrapped in plastic which they made us remove. I again brought this to management, saying that when we remove the plastic from these vials we’re potentially being exposed to cytotoxic material as the reason this plastic wrap is there in the first place is because manufacturers discovered that when the vials where being filled drug residue was found on the outside of the vials therefore plastic wrap after filling is done to prevent exposure to this residue. Their response, well we have to take the plastic off that’s what our VHP cycles are validated for!! I honestly can’t stress enough how much of a toxic place this is to work in. The management are incompetent. I worked there for two years and believe me that was two years too long. You get into a cycle, you work such long hours that you’re too exhausted to even think of applying for jobs when you get home at night, then when you do and you get an interview, they won’t give you the time off and then when you get a job you’ve to give them two months notice! In the end I just quit, I couldn’t take working their anymore. I can honestly say with my hand on my heart that if myself or any of my family members ever got cancer and had to use Baxter product I’d say no and ask the hospital could I make the chemo myself that’s how little I trust this company and their ability to produce proper safe product for patients. Again it’s not that the staff don’t care, it’s that they’re not trained properly on the actual drugs, they work such long hours coupled with thesetup in the isolators I believe it’s very easy to make a mistake and for cross contamination of products to occur. I honestly can’t understand how the HPRA issue them a medical license year after year. If they just delved a little deeper they’d find some disturbing discoveries even if they just looked at the amount of product Baxter make in the timeframe they say they do! Baxter have no competition in Ireland as they make all the chemotherapy for all of the hospitals bar one or two which make their own on the grounds. This lack of competition is laughable and probably explains why the HPRA don’t delve to deeply into Baxter’s practices. All I can say is AVOID AVOID AVOID!!