How the Isala Zwolle hospital pharmacy was the first to develop ready-to-use syringes with medication
In the past year, Hitma has worked closely with the pharmacy at Isala, which is the hospital in the city of Zwolle. They were involved in a unique project with an automatic syringe-filling machine. Here, Isala Zwolle’s hospital pharmacy has achieved a first. It is the first pharmacy in Europe to create medicines centrally and ready-to-use in sterilised syringes. This saves nurses a lot of time – in the past, they had to prepare the syringes on the wards. It also greatly reduces the chance of errors and contamination.
Error reduction
I read on Isala Zwolle’s website that they discovered that errors could be reduced by 22% if medication was supplied to nurses in ready-to-use syringes. This inspired Isala Zwolle to start filling syringes in the hospital pharmacy in 2009. In 2015, they were filling 57,000 syringes for the nursing department. That was 7% of all the injectable medication they needed. During this initial period, the syringes had a very short shelf life and had to be stored in the refrigerator. This was a huge disadvantage.
Sterilisable syringes
This situation changed when the Isala Zwolle pharmacists were able to use a new type of syringe. Because these syringes are manufactured from a higher-quality type of plastic, they can be sterilised. It means that filled syringes can be stored at room temperature, and that really speeded up the project.
Superfast filling machine
Isala Zwolle purchased a type of filling machine that the pharmaceutical industry had stopped using. The machine can fill syringes of different sizes and is very fast. In the past, employees at the pharmacy would spend half a morning filling 200 50-millilitre syringes. Now the machine fills 800 to 4,000 syringes in an hour, depending on the requisite volume.
Longer shelf life
Because the filled syringes are sterilised in the pharmacy, they have a shelf life of three months. That used to be a maximum of one month. The aim is to ultimately have syringes with a shelf life of at least one year. In the meantime, a list was drawn up of medication that is suitable for these ready-to-use syringes.
Single-use technology
Besides being the first in Europe to prepare ready-to-use syringes with medication in a machine, the Isala Zwolle pharmacy is also the first to use a complete single-use system for filling liquids.
Cost savings and efficiency
The use of single-use components and systems offers Isala Zwolle significant advantages in terms of cost savings and efficiency. With single-use systems, the pharmacy can quickly switch between production batches of different liquid medicines and respond to changes in supply and demand.
Plug and play
Single-use also simplifies the process because it just needs to be validated once. After every batch, the single-use process components are thrown away. Immediately afterwards, a new plug and play assembly can be used without having to clean and validate everything.
Strict requirements
Needless to say, Isala Zwolle has strict requirements for the sterility of the filling process and the ready-to-use syringes. Single-use systems and assemblies comply with the strict quality requirements of the pharmaceutical industry. At Hitma, too, we comply with these pharmaceutical standards when building assemblies in our cleanroom.
Development in pharmacies
Isala Zwolle is the first pharmacy in our customer base to use the full single-use technology for filling liquids. The transition to single-use technology is also taking place in other pharmacies. We expect the developments at Isala Zwolle to really speed up this transition and are very curious about how other producing pharmacies are dealing with it. We will follow the developments in this area with great interest.