The pharmaceutical industry is under increasing legislative and consumer pressure to improve product and user information on packs. With so much money being invested on product development and launch, compromising vital end-user instruction is not an option.
Di Stafford is Director of The Patient Practice, a consultancy which works with the pharmaceutical industry to improve patient information. She recently outlined some of the key issues faced by the industry today: “In the USA alone approximately 25% of serious medication errors reported to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) are related to labelling and packaging. These can often occur due to sound-alike and look-alike packaging and labelling. The effects can be serious or at worst fatal. Clearly packaging has to be a fundamental part of the treatment.”
A 2007 report from the National Patient Safety Agency (“Design for patient safety: A guide to the graphic design of medication packaging”) drew similar conclusions for the UK healthcare market. The report estimated that there are about 900,000 recorded adverse events in the NHS every year* and improvements to the design of medicine packaging could reduce this figure whilst also improve medication compliance. It is estimated that a third of medication errors are caused by confusion over packaging and labelling instructions**. Healthcare is delivered in many different contexts and patients’ sensory, physical and mental capabilities vary greatly. Design solutions have to address these factors.
Industry experts agree with these findings and suggest that there is considerable scope for improvement within the areas of packaging and labelling to improve the effectiveness of the product and ultimately the experience of the end-user. The use of simple, easy-to-follow instruction, colour coding, font size and even simply adding more white space to emphasize important information are all factors of consideration.
To conclude, Di Stafford commented: “I think there’s a real opportunity to use multi-page labels on pharmaceutical products. A lot of pharmaceutical companies have a requirement to produce information in a number of different languages on a single label. Companies are also looking to add value by improving the quality and readability of the information they provide, and to offer solutions to aid medication compliance.”
Denny Bros Ltd specialises in offering solutions-led packaging to the pharmaceutical industry and is a leading supplier of the multi-page leaflet label system Fix-a-Form.
Contact us today to see how your brand can benefit from Fix-a-Form.
* www.npsa.nhs.uk/about
** ‘Reducing Medication Errors Through Naming, Labelling and Packaging’,
Berman A., Journal of Medical Systems, Volume 28, Issue 1, 2004
Stefan Regula, Denny Bros Ltd, 20 January 2010
