Even if you are a healthy person who is part of a healthy family, well, odds are that you have all kinds and types of prescription (and over the counter) medication in your home. In fact, statistics show that nearly half of Americans took a prescription drug sometime during the past month. And here?s another big-picture fact?according to statistics from 2010, physicians and pharmacies prescribed or provided more than 2.5 billion prescription drugs during after doctor?s office visits. The blister packaging used by medication manufacturers helps keep pills and tablets orderly, safe, and fresh and useful.
Even if you say to yourself ?just what is blister packaging,? you almost certainly are familiar with it. Medical blister packaging is most often made from plastic, and is formed so that individual tablets are securely sealed up in small pockets with a foil backing. The consumer presses the pill out through the foil. For many medications, peelable lamination on the packaging makes for easier opening. At the same time, blister packaging designs (like bottle packaging designs) can be created to include features that can help make a medicine more child safe.
While safety and organization are certainly big pluses for consumers, blister packaging is also attractive to drug companies for business reasons. For example, it takes a very small amount of time to effectively package a large product amount. Expiration dates and lot numbers (for quality control) can easily be printed on packaging. If combined with vinyl, the appearance of the packs can also be varied?from completely opaque to clear and translucent. The ability to change up container types, color, and style means blister packaging is readily customizable.
Those individual pills are not the only place where best medical packaging techniques are employed. Liners and seals on bottles insure that the product inside has not been tampered with. Liquids, too, can be packaged in pouches or sachets in premeasured doses.
A tremendous consumer benefit of blister packaging on nonprescription medications can be when your allergies kick in after a winter hiatus. You desperately scrounge one, measly pill from the bottom of your purse to get through the work day, and the labeling on the blister pack insures that the tablet is, indeed the kind you need.
