Improving Patient Safety through Packaging

At Pharmapack 2009, Catherine Blanchon, in supply chain quality management for Nestle Nutrition, recounted the risks to patient safety often present during administration of parenteral nutrition. Patients often require more than one formula, so treatments can be complex. Custom mixtures are often employed, as are several separate solutions that cannot be mixed. Risks include mixing, dosing, and delivery errors as well as the mistaken intravenous delivery of enteral nutritional. Blanchon wished aloud for packaging that could reduce typical errors, such as a five-chamber package with complete ready-to-use stable nutrition.

Increasing patient safety in healthcare settings continues to be a global priority, and for good reason. “Available data suggest that health care is responsible for about one adverse event occurring in about 10% of hospitalizations in middle to high-income countries, and causing thousands of deaths every year,” reports the World Health Organization.

Technology can help. “Properly used, technology can greatly improve patient safety,” wrote the Health Committee of the U.K. Parliament’s House of Commons. “The automation of various processes in healthcare could reduce, or perhaps even eliminate, a number of errors that are attributable to causes such as failures in memory and lapses of attention on the part of both clinical and non-clinical healthcare workers. This could apply to areas where the accurate carrying out of tasks such as checking and measuring is crucial to patient safety.” The committee issued these statements in its Sixth Report on Patient Safety published in June 2009.

Pharmapack 2010 will continue its study of how packaging innovations can increase patient and practitioner safety and convenience. Exhibitors will be showcasing packaging and labeling technologies that can promote safe pharmaceutical and medical device use. For instance, exhibiting in Booth A26 will be Schreiner Medipharm of Schreiner Group, which recently received a WorldStar Award in the competition’s pharmaceutical category for its Needle-Trap label system. The system features an integrated safety device to help prevent accidental needlestick injuries.

In addition, speaking at the conference will be Fred Field, vice president of research and product development, Safety Syringes UK. His presentation, “Implementation of Needle-Stick Safety Device with Injectable Drugs—Experiences and Lessons Learned from More than 20 Drug Launches,” will look at the legislative and competitive pushes toward needle-stick safety and how drug manufacturers can implement such safety devices.

Also present to share technologies designed to prevent medial errors will be BD Medical—Pharmaceutical Systems, exhibiting its prefillable parenteral drug delivery systems in Booth A23/A25, and Duoject Medical Systems, displaying its solutions for easing drug reconstitution, in Booth D34. For more details on the upcoming Pharmapack 2010 event, visit www.pharmapack.fr.

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