Great points about balancing the safety of your consumers and the safety and privacy of your employees. in developing your personal medicine policies, you need to consider the following aspects:
- what medicines fall into this group, how are they defined (in North America, you can't really ask your employees what medicines they take), so it becomes more of a telling them - recommended by your health care professional is one good way. I would be very cautious about any restrictions like keeping it in their locker, or a supervisors office - talk to your HR folks before you go that route.
Assuming you are going to allow certain medicines into the production areas, you need to define what the risks are, and how you control them. The main risks would likely be accidental (do you need to consider deliberate as well? this would be part of your food defence protocol) contamination of the product, what are the routes? Time to pull out a risk assessment...
- what are they stored in? the container should not in itself introduce new risks, and should minimize the risk of losing the container
- how many doses are allowed to be in the product zone (would you allow 2 months' worth of warfarin on the floor, or should it be a single dose?)
- how is the container to be labelled?
- if needed, where is the medicine to be taken (do they need to step away from open product?)
- what happens if they lose their medicines in the facility?
I would think a nice concise policy would be able to cover a lot of this, and educating all your employees on the "why" part of the whole issue re-enforces your culture about protecting your consumers, and your employees.
John