During the drug repackaging process, cross-contamination is a major concern, as the effects can be disastrous for businesses and consumers. Any drug repackaging business that sends out contaminated medicines will soon find itself facing a lot of legal trouble. Below are some simple techniques for preventing cross-contamination in your business.
Validate Your Cleaning Methods
Cleaning validation is the process by which you establish the effectiveness of your cleaning processes. There are several ways that you can approach your cleaning validation. Remember that cleaning equipment is about more than just removing the obvious dirt. You should also use a low residue soap to clean equipment. Otherwise, you can quickly end up with a microbial build-up on your equipment that will ruin the purity of any drugs that you process.
In most cases, you will want an external business to conduct the cleaning validation. This will ensure that the process is objective, and any issues are brought to your attention.
Clean Your Equipment Thoroughly
One of the simplest and most effective ways of eliminating pharmaceutical contamination is to ensure that you clean and maintain your equipment properly. If you do not sanitize and sterilize your equipment appropriately, contamination is all but guaranteed. The condition of your equipment is just as important as the cleaning processes that you use. Machines that are not cleaned and maintained correctly will accumulate various substances within them. The accumulation of residue can ultimately compromise the purity of any drugs that you repackage.
Maintaining accurate records of maintenance and cleaning work for each piece of equipment will make it much easier for you to stay on top of these routine tasks.
Form a Quality Control Team
Quality control is essential within the pharmaceutical industry. In the manufacture and distribution of drugs, there is no room for error. A quality control team will help to ensure that your processes are sound and reliable.
There should be no possibility of contaminated or faulty drugs making it out of your facility and into the supply chain. A robust quality control process will catch any potential issues before they can impact anyone else.
Provide Proper Training
Training all your staff to use the equipment in your business properly is absolutely essential. Staff with inadequate training are much more likely to make mistakes or overlook crucial parts of the process.
Instituting standard operating procedures that are easy for staff to learn will bring new hires up to standard as soon as possible. Inadequate training puts your business and other workers at risk.
Protective Clothing
Any workers who will be handling medications themselves need to observe appropriate protection and hygiene regulations. Protective apparel will keep your workers safe when they are handling medication and help avoid cross-contamination. Protective apparel includes lab coats, masks, gowns, goggles, gloves, and more.
Keeping cross-contamination to a minimum, or eliminating it entirely from your pharmaceutical repackaging business, is possible. However, you will need to put the right policies and procedures in place. The tips above should help you with devising the right SOPs for your business.
