It is essential that pharmacy staff, store customers, and the environments to which those individuals are exposed be protected from particles dispersed during compounding when powders are handled, incorporated into preparations, or become airborne when vessels that contain them are opened. The primary engineering controls used most often in nonsterile compounding to protect against such contaminants are fume hoods and powder-containment hoods. Those units must routinely undergo certification testing to confirm that they provide the level of protection for which they were designed. In this article, which pertains to powder-containment hoods as a safeguard against airborne contaminants, questions about certification are answered, finding a qualified certification company and addressing the findings revealed during assessment are discussed, and an example of a single-pass certification report is provided for review.
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