The Customer: Baxter Healthcare
For more than 85 years, Baxter Healthcare has been involved in saving and sustaining lives. Manufacturing and selling medical products and equipment, Baxter offers intravenous fluids, hospital devices and equipment, blood collection equipment, vaccines, blood factor substitutes and more. It also operates pharmacy service facilities which provide chemotherapy, nutritional, and antibiotic intravenous solutions.
For Baxter, high standards of hygiene and strict protocols are more than a matter of maintaining standards. There have been documented instances with other manufacturers internationally where lapses in pharmacy cleaning have led to patient sickness and death.
The Need
Baxter has stringent and wide-ranging cleaning requirements for its Australian headquarters in Toongabbie, New South Wales – and sites across Australia – that go above and beyond standard high-grade hygiene practices.
This includes thorough documentation and frequent audits by Baxter’s internal Quality Assurance Team. In addition to normal cleaning and hygiene services in general areas, Baxter Healthcare has Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) cleaning requirements for specialist pharmaceutical cleanrooms. This is a highly regulated type of sanitation which requires rigorous training and well-designed protocols.
Baxter requires all current and prospective suppliers to meet strict and verifiable standards of performance including Health and Safety, intellectual property and ethical best practice. It is critical to Baxter that all suppliers share its commitment to Business with Integrity. This ethos fits OCS’s core values of Care, Safety, Trustworthy and Expert. As with all OCS’ partnerships, we work beyond mere service provision to ensure a comprehensive solution for every customer.
The OCS Solution
OCS has partnered with Baxter Healthcare in Toongabbie, NSW since 2010.
OCS provides:
- GMP cleaning
- Manufacturing and warehouse cleaning with forklift-licensed cleaning staff
- Windows and high-risk pressure cleaning
- Office cleaning
- Hygiene services
GMP cleaning refers to a carefully-controlled environment in order to prevent contamination. Maintenance of these areas offers challenges because potential contaminants are constantly being generated. GMP cleaning and processes remove particles from critical areas instead of spreading them from one surface to another.
GMP cleaning requires fastidious attention to detail, thorough training, flexible availability of qualified back-up staff and adherence to a strict set of KPI’s. These include procedures and documentation that demonstrate compliance to Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Pharmaceutical Inspection Co-operation Scheme (PIC/S) guide to manufacturing practices for medicinal products.
OCS has been certified GMP proficient in Australia. This means we are able to supply production cleaning services to many of the world’s leading pharmaceutical manufacturing operations, including Baxter. We have the industry’s best trainers and operational field workers to support our certified cleaning staff. We partner with manufacturers to provide the cleanest, quality-controlled compliant facilities.
Strict Protocols
OCS provides high-grade sanitation with strict adherence to protocols. This is critical for Baxter because most potential contaminants are microscopic and a single microbe could cause an entire batch of drugs to be quarantined or discarded.
For maintenance of GMP areas, OCS team members follow stringent guidelines which include the wearing of protective gloves, boots, eyewear, masks and head coverings. OCS uses cleaning agents, methods and products that are equipment-appropriate and closely documents all GMP activity.
Special Training
OCS specially trains team members to work in sensitive environments at Baxter, including training in Standard Operating Procedures and how to integrate documentation into the cleaning routine. OCS also maintains an effective Corrective Action Preventive Action (CAPA) protocol which means team members know how to prevent issues, and what to do if a problem arises.
OCS conducts refresher training for its team members in order to stay up-to-date with new methods and meet the highest levels of health and safety best practice.
Protecting Productivity
Through this highly customised solution, OCS has been able to deliver a number of operational benefits to Baxter Healthcare, including:
- Protecting product yield
- OCS GMP cleaning has minimised lost product that may otherwise have needed to be discarded due to improper practice
- Minimised waste of resources
- Our strict quality control and attention to detail protects highly valuable pharmaceutical components
- Ensures experiments and products are not compromised.
- Our partnership and commitment to expertise creates a safe environment for sensitive equipment
- Ultimately keeps operating costs down. Front-end prevention and care means fewer losses and greater productivity.
