A new veterinary chemotherapy safety checklist will be launched at the 51st WSAVA World Congress in Warsaw, Poland, held 13–15 October 2026 at EXPO XXI. The checklist will be free to download for every practice, anywhere in the world.
Chemotherapy is no longer reserved for referral centres. More dogs and cats with cancer are treated in general practice, often by teams that give chemotherapy only a few times a month. That is exactly where mistakes happen. When a procedure is rare, people rely on memory, and memory fails under pressure.
The stakes are high. Cytotoxic drugs have a narrow margin between a helpful dose and a harmful one. A misplaced decimal, a dose calculated in mg/kg instead of mg/m², a missed neutrophil count, the wrong patient or a perivascular injection can each cause serious harm. The same drugs also pose a risk to the people who prepare and give them, and to owners at home.
Human oncology learned this lesson years ago. Nurses and pharmacists there work to the ASCO/ONS Chemotherapy Administration Safety Standards, and checklists are built into daily routine. The evidence is encouraging. In a simulation study from Toronto, adding one specific checklist item to verify patient identity raised detection of that error by 65%. Hospitals that introduced chemotherapy checklists have reported fewer administration errors and fewer near misses.
Veterinary medicine has excellent guidance on safe handling, including the 2018 ACVIM consensus statement and the 2016 AAHA Oncology Guidelines. The BSAVA Formulary recommends that practices develop a pre-administration checklist. What has been missing is a ready-made, practical tool that any team can pick up and use tomorrow morning.
This checklist fills that gap. It walks the team through the key checks before, during and after treatment: confirming the patient and the protocol, reviewing bloodwork, verifying the dose calculation with a second person, preparing and administering safely, and giving clear instructions to the owner. Each item is specific, short and placed in the order the work is actually done, because that is what makes a checklist effective rather than another form to fill in.
The checklist will be presented at the Congress on Thursday Oct 15 12.20-13.05 (GMT+2) Hall 4 by Dr Nick Bacon and Dr. Jolle Kirpensteijn. Anyone attending in Warsaw is warmly invited to join the session, ask questions and share how it might work in their own practice.
The checklist is free to download. Print it, laminate it, put it next to the chemotherapy cabinet and use it for every patient. Share it with your colleagues, your nurses and your technicians. Safe chemotherapy is a team effort, and a simple checklist is one of the best tools a team can have.
We also have a Polish version:
See you in Warsaw.
Further reading
- White RE et al. Checking it twice: an evaluation of checklists for detecting medication errors at the bedside using a chemotherapy model. Qual Saf Health Care 2010
- Neuss MN et al. 2016 Updated ASCO/ONS Chemotherapy Administration Safety Standards
- Smith AN et al. ACVIM small animal consensus statement on safe use of cytotoxic chemotherapeutics in veterinary practice. J Vet Intern Med 2018
- 2016 AAHA Oncology Guidelines for Dogs and Cats
- WSAVA 2026 World Congress
