Control of medicines

Hi this is my first post of hopefully many. We are a packaging site certified to the brc food packaging standard. I was wondering how other companies manage medicines. We have tried several policies and none seem feasible

Any ideas welcome

Hi Fnazir,

Make the procedure like this:
Only medicines that are necessary for a medical reason to carry with you at all times are allowed in production areas.
The user should confirm this with the responsible manager before entering the production area.
Keep a record with persons who use medicins.
The medicines should be safely stored in a small box, in case of lost it needs to be reported to the responsible manager immediately.

Have a nice day, Okido

Hi Fauzia, I’m glad you were able to log on eventually.

Okido helps you with the procedure if taking medicines into production environment is unavoidable. I have some views on trying to avoid it in the first place.

Medicines like all other personal items such as mobile phones, cigarettes, wallets, purses, sweets etc. must (ideally) be kept out of production areas. If left alone people like to create a home-from-home in their workplace with all of their personal effects and comforts surrounding them. The other issue is that some of these things are valuable so they like to keep them close by.

In my experience the only way to control this is to provide every employee with a locker for storing personal effects like these here:

http://www.helmsman....20_compartments

These lockers should be housed in an area that is very visible and accessible such as a corridor just before entry into production. That way there is no excuse for personnel taking things into production.

Regarding medicines for most medical conditions the employee can wait until break-times to take medicine, but in the odd case where it needs to be taken more frequently you can make allowances for the employee to leave their work station whilst they retrieve and take from their locker. For anything more extreme that requires very, very frequent taking of medicine in the workplace you would need to provide an individual plan for achieving this whilst maintaining the safety of the product and protecting it from contamination.

Hope this helps. A very warm welcome to the forums Fauzia.

Regards,
Simon

Dear Fauzia,

I am in toltal agreement with Simon, that ALL personal belongings should be in lockers and not in the production area, I control medicine in the attached policy, which has passed BRC inspection time after time.

Kind regards,

Steve

Dear Fauzia,

I am in toltal agreement with Simon, that ALL personal belongings should be in lockers and not in the production area, I control medicine in the attached policy, which has passed BRC inspection time after time.

Kind regards,

Steve

Nice one Steve, that's very helpful.

Simon

Hi thanks for your replies the issue we have is that we do not provide shop floor with personal lockers other than those to store thier work clothes in. So where do we stand in terms of allowing this, workwear and medicines. Especially medicines in glass bottles.

Hi thanks for your replies the issue we have is that we do not provide shop floor with personal lockers other than those to store thier work clothes in. So where do we stand in terms of allowing this, workwear and medicines. Especially medicines in glass bottles.

Then you need to control it, so for example you could require personnel to hand in medicines to supervisor and keep them in an office or somewhere remote from production areas where they can be stored and taken safely when needed

Regards,
Simon