Nemera’s safety measures during the COVID-19 pandemic

As people and companies make their way through the COVID-19 pandemic, sharing best practices around crisis management has become the need of the hour. We posed 4 questions to Christian Meusinger, our Head of Quality, Regulatory and Environment Health & Safety. He shares what we are doing at Nemera to ensure safety of our employees whilst continuing to manufacture life-saving devices to serve patients and customers.

What safety measures have been put in place at Nemera during the COVID-19 pandemic?

As soon as and early on when the COVID-19 outbreak began, we implemented global guidelines based on our Pandemic BCP with regards to the governance and organization of such a crisis. Obviously, as for many other companies, this was new to us and the speed of the spread was and still is clearly a challenge. Currently, the BCP governance process we have in place is working well and the measures are reviewed with our CEO and the crisis team in pre-scheduled  and very focused virtual meetings. Managing critical suppliers, internal hygiene and protection of people, training and last but not the least internal and external communication have been the priority areas where we put measures and controls in place.

Given that our primary activity is manufacturing, what special measures are put in place for the employees working in manufacturing sites?

Our site in Germany was where a positive COVID-19 case was identified and we followed-up with Health Authorities. Social distancing and the protection of these employees producing the most critical products for our patient groups became a top priority. Numerous measures such as level 1 contacts quarantine, social distancing, home offices, special protection for gowning and behavioral instructions were implemented. For most of these activities, I would say we are privileged as we have since many years, Pharmaceutical GMP’s (Good Manufacturing Practices) in place. The cultural shift and adherence to increased measures has been very quick from our employees.

How are we updating these measures?

During the last weeks we made several improvements to our governance process with the local BCP Crisis teams. They helped a lot to share good practices and develop new strategies or responses.  This is an on-going and structured process and we keep trying to find innovative solutions to respond to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 situation.

What is your message to our peers in the industry?

From my perspective, the way the virus is spreading is now being understood in all parts of the world. We, as a drug delivery devices industry, cannot directly heal people in hospitals, but we can continue to serve the people who are working in or for hospitals. We can ensure that with our measures we protect them from having too many people rushing to the hospital. That would help limit the number of people they need to take care of. Some people might be tired of hearing it, but social distancing is the most effective way to minimize the risk of the virus’ transmission.

I wish that more exchange and alignments take place across our industry. Thanks to the overview of all our manufacturing sites, I have seen the benefits of exchanging best practices. I am truly living the “together we are stronger” feeling and it makes me proud.

About Nemera

Nemera is a world leader in the design, development, and manufacturing of drug delivery devices for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and generics industries. Nemera offers a comprehensive portfolio of products and services across ophthalmology, nasal, inhalation, dermal, transdermal and parenteral delivery. Nemera’s vision is to be the most patient-centric drug delivery device company. Nemera always puts patients first, providing high-quality solutions that have a demonstrable impact on patients’ health

Nemera’s newly branded Insight Innovation Center, with offices in North America and Europe, provides consultative services to support your overall device strategy. Providing user research, Human Factors, User Experience design, and Design for manufacturing, the Insight Innovation Center can help customers navigate their device strategy for both novel and platform solutions. Users are at the center of everything that we do in our effort to always put patients first.