Product Responsibility - Baxter Sustainability Report

Baxter works with governments and healthcare providers to help conduct studies, set standards and implementconversion to closed IV systems in numerous markets to improve public health. For example, Baxter workedwith the government of Brazil, which now requires all of the country's nearly 8,000 hospitals to use closed IVsystems. In Colombia, where the government now recommends the use of closed systems, approximately75 percent of hospitals have converted. In 2010, Baxter worked with four Ministry of Health-affiliated hospitalsin Mexico to implement closed systems.Patients also can acquire bloodstream infections when medication is administered through an IV catheter.Some can be deadly, including treatment-resistant bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcusaureus (MRSA), which causes nearly 20,000 deaths a year in the United States alone, according to theU.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2008, Baxter launched the V-LINK device, the firstneedle-less IV connector with an antimicrobial coating. In vitro testing has shown that the device kills at least99.99% of six common pathogens known to cause catheter-related bloodstream infections, including MRSA.In the United Kingdom, a study at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham – part of a broader initiative by theNational Health Service to assess the effectiveness of a range of infection-control technologies – comparedthe V-LINK device to a non-antimicrobial device in more than 200 patients (see summary document). While noepisodes of catheter-related bloodstream infection were observed in any patients during the study period, theV-LINK device had significantly less internal microbial contamination, which, the study concluded, “may leadto a reduced risk of such infection.” A similar study is being conducted at Emory University Hospitals in Atlanta,Georgia, United States.Decreasing Medication ErrorsThe Institute of Medicine in the United States estimates that medication errors injure 1.5 million individualseach year, and that 7,000 people die annually as a result. 2 Other research shows even greater mortalitystatistics in other countries.Baxter helps decrease medication errors in several ways. The company's premixed IV drugs are ready to useso hospital pharmacists do not have to prepare these critical drugs themselves. Baxter was the first companyto work with other pharmaceutical firms to premix their drugs in IV solution, and is the only manufacturer offrozen premixed drugs for compounds that are not stable at room temperature.For IV drugs that must be administered in a very specific dose or have other special requirements, Baxteroperates pharmacy compounding centers in some countries. Hospital pharmacies transmit prescriptionselectronically to the Baxter compounding center, where pharmacists and technicians prepare patient-specificpremixed drugs under sterile conditions and deliver them to the hospital ready for administration.http://www.sustainability.baxter.com/product-responsibility/safety.html© Copyright 2011 Baxter International Inc. All Rights Reserved.