Packaging: Your Last Point of Contact with Patients

The Netherlands Packaging Centre (NVC) and the Healthcare Compliance Packaging Council (HCPC) Europe have teamed up to release a position paper stating that "designing packaged medicinal products in the proper way . . . may significantly contribute to the improvement of healthcare by stimulating, supporting, and enabling an effective adherence of the patient to the medication prescribed."

Michael Nieuwesteeg, NVC's managing director and Tassilo Korab, executive director of HCPC-Europe, introduced the paper at Innopack during a day-long Innovation Briefs moderated by PMP News editor Daphne Allen.

When announcing the paper to the Innopack audience, Korab recounted a memorable statement made by a patient during a roundtable discussion HCPC-Europe and NVC had held with patients, healthcare providers, pharma companies, and others. "The last point of contact between the healthcare system and the patient is not the pharmacist, but the packaging," this patient said. "And sometimes that can present a real hurdle."

During his discussion on packaging innovation, Nieuwesteeg urged Innopack attendees to review Article 9 of the United Nations's ENABLE program, which stresses Accessibility.

Interestingly, he said that ISO TC122 WG9 N 047 is working on "Accessible Design in Packaging."

Aiming for accessibility will serve pharmaceutical packagers espousing HCPC-Europe/NVC's call to action. They see success in these actions:

"Take the point of consumption as the starting point for packaging design."
"Apply available and possible newly developed communicative and behavioural insights into packaging."
"Use packaging to facilitate and stimulate positive feedback loops between patient and healthcare providers."

Pharma packaging designers can look to consumer packaging for ideas that could benefit patients, the groups write.

Nieuwesteeg reiterated that point to the Innopack audience: "You can learn more by looking outside your own industry. Remember, technologies that are now being used in pharma like folding cartons and RFID did not start in the pharma industry!"

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