Liz Gyekye / PackagingNews

Packaging may ‘significantly’ help patient healthcare

Well-designed packaging may ‘significantly’ contribute to the improvement of patient healthcare, according to new research.

In a joint effort, NVC Netherlands Packaging Centre and HCPC Europe have published a position paper on the opportunities of improving patient adherence in medicine through packaging.

Researchers say that designing packaged medicinal products in the “proper way”, may “significantly contribute to the improvement of healthcare by “stimulating, supporting and enabling an effective adherence of the patient to the medication prescribed”.

HCPC Europe is a not-for-profit organisation and the NVC Netherlands Packaging Centre is a packaging association.

The research also states that the last point of contact between the patient and the healthcare providers is not the dispensing pharmacist but the pharmaceutical packaging.

‘Intelligent packaging’

It states that the packaging can represent a huge barrier when the patient arrives home and opens it, but at the same time packaging may significantly contribute to the improvement of patient adherence in medicine, for instance through communication and the use of intelligent packaging.

Adherence to medication is the process by which patients take their medications as prescribed, according to the research.

By publishing this research both bodies aim to increase awareness of the potential of packaging design to improve healthcare by facilitating patient adherence.

It urges the pharmaceutical industry to create opportunities by directing basic research funding to “innovative packaging concepts”.