Patient Safety

Pharmapack Europe kicked off its patient-centered conference and exhibition on February 13 in Paris, promoting ideas and technologies for driving product safety and ease of use, patient compliance, and anticounterfeiting. Speakers at the conference urged attendees to consider the importance of packaging and labeling for effective product use.

The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) has issued new instructions to promote safe use of the fibrin sealants Tisseel, Tissucol, Artiss, and Beriplast P during surgery. This advice follows that issued for two other fibrin sealants, Evicel and Quixil, in November 2012. Employed to help reduce local bleeding, these sealants are typically dripped or sprayed onto bleeding tissue to form a fibrin clot.

Safe in Common (SIC), a non-profit organization aiming to end needlestick and sharps-related injuries, is hosting a panel of healthcare safety experts this week to discuss development of a unified plan to address the shortcomings in injury prevention. According to the group, "The Unfinished Agenda" picks up where federal regulations left off more than 10 years ago and examines modern needlestick safety from its roots in the 1980s HIV/AIDS crisis to where we stand today.

Human behavior has been all but ignored as the root cause for the failure of healthcare adherence, argues John Bitner, a design engineer who has studied human interaction with packaging for decades. “People are adverse to change,” he says. “Even when faced with a very bad disease, and they know a lifestyle change is essential to survival, for whatever reason, they cannot.”

FDA has approved SPRIX (ketorolac tromethamine), an intranasal formulation of the analgesic drug ketorolac, as an alternative to opioids. While the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory ketorolac has typically been given in hospitals as an injection for short-term pain, SPRIX has been approved as a nasal spray for outpatient use. The new drug uses a nasal spray pump from Aptar Pharma.