After one week of work at a Pharmaceutical Company, it sets me thinking about how serious and meticulous one needs to be when working in a Pharmaceutical industry. Quality departmentshas to conduct checks very carefully to ensure the safety of our customers taking the drugs. Every little step is not to be belittled. Checks are so thoroughly done that every single ingredient, be it the raw materials to synthesise the active pharmaceutical ingredient(API), the crude API, the purified API, the API present in the final drug form, the excipients (other ingredients that make up the drug besides the API itself), all these have to undergo various stages of testing. Failure in any one stage, depending on the magnitude of deviation, would trigger investigations and reports to account for the failure. Double checkings, with initials and dates are required for each and every step, such that no errors are tolerated. They even have special manuals and protocols to follow when washing/using/storing the apparatus. All the procedures they have to go through, and all those mentioned above constitutes only a small portion of the quality control department.
What about the manufacturing plant itself? Where conditions are even stricter as the drugs produced are to be released into the market for sale. Even the storerooms that issues safety equipments to employees are not spared, every single piece of information needs to be documented and accounted for. This is part of Good Manufacturing Process and Good Documentation Practice. This is the power of logbooks, logsheets, and MPS (Merck's Production System, something like the famous Toyota Production System), which summaries the complexity of a MNC at work.
For every action you take, keep in mind that the final product made is going to be released markets all over the world, and eventually someone is gonna take the tablet, in hope of improving his/her quality of life. This patient is putting full faith in the company that the tablet has been produced under stringent conditions with all the requirements met and that his/her health would improve after taking the tablet.
Purchasing a drug is not like shopping for clothes. You will be able to see a loose thread on a skirt, or a missing button on your shirt, but physically it would be impossible to tell if a drug is safe to be consumed just by looking at it. The safety lies in the hands of the company producing it, and that responsibility is huge. Always bear in mind that someday, your loved ones might be taking those drugs produced by the company, you would not want those drugs to hurt them would you? Every little step, no matter how tedious it is, matters.
Next time, before popping in a tablet, think about all the combined efforts that have been put together in order to produce that small little tablet. A lot has to be done. Do appreciate it. (:
What about the manufacturing plant itself? Where conditions are even stricter as the drugs produced are to be released into the market for sale. Even the storerooms that issues safety equipments to employees are not spared, every single piece of information needs to be documented and accounted for. This is part of Good Manufacturing Process and Good Documentation Practice. This is the power of logbooks, logsheets, and MPS (Merck's Production System, something like the famous Toyota Production System), which summaries the complexity of a MNC at work.
For every action you take, keep in mind that the final product made is going to be released markets all over the world, and eventually someone is gonna take the tablet, in hope of improving his/her quality of life. This patient is putting full faith in the company that the tablet has been produced under stringent conditions with all the requirements met and that his/her health would improve after taking the tablet.
Purchasing a drug is not like shopping for clothes. You will be able to see a loose thread on a skirt, or a missing button on your shirt, but physically it would be impossible to tell if a drug is safe to be consumed just by looking at it. The safety lies in the hands of the company producing it, and that responsibility is huge. Always bear in mind that someday, your loved ones might be taking those drugs produced by the company, you would not want those drugs to hurt them would you? Every little step, no matter how tedious it is, matters.
Next time, before popping in a tablet, think about all the combined efforts that have been put together in order to produce that small little tablet. A lot has to be done. Do appreciate it. (:
