“Due to epidemic control, the hospital I frequent is temporarily unable to provide intravenous treatment, what should I do?” Facing advanced lung cancer patients Wang’s request for help, an emergency operation started. Shanghai pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, hospitals and other parties relayed love, and finally the patient completed the infusion within 24 hours.
Wang suffers from advanced lung cancer and needs to go to the hospital to inject pembrolizumab regularly. The last dose was March 4th. According to the 21-day medication cycle, he has already been delayed for 10 days due to the epidemic. If he delays further, he may miss a medication cycle, which will affect the treatment effect at light level, and cause adverse reactions in severe cases or may cause the treatment to fail.
The reporter learned that because pembrolizumab needs to be injected intravenously, it must go to the hospital for injection treatment, and it cannot be used at home by itself, and the transportation must be in a cold chain throughout the process. On the afternoon of April 7, the patient went to a hospital on his own, but was unable to receive treatment due to epidemic control. At that time, many delivery pharmacies were temporarily closed. After multiple contacts, only Shanghai Pharmacy Cloud Health Yiyao Pharmacy still had capacity. At the critical moment, the relevant team of the multinational pharmaceutical company Merck also participated and took the initiative to coordinate. At 7:38 p.m., good news came: patients can go to Shanghai Dunfu Hospital for infusions the next day. At 17:00 the next day, after the joint efforts of many parties, the patient finally completed the infusion under the 24-hour relay operation.
In fact, the relay of love to patient Wang is not an isolated case. Since March, the epidemic situation in Shanghai has been severe. In the face of various logistics problems, how to solve the difficulty of purchasing drugs for patients and ensure the actual drug needs of cancer patients? At present, major pharmaceutical companies in Shanghai are actively working with industry partners to focus on patients, and go all out to open up all aspects of drug delivery to patients, racing against time to ensure that special drugs are delivered to patients on time.
On April 2nd, during the epidemic, vehicles from other provinces and cities could not apply for a vehicle pass in Shanghai, and vehicles in this city could not go out of the market. The border between Jiangsu and Shanghai opens. Beijing Science Park, which is the first in the relay race, will use subpackaged cold chain boxes for the special tumor drugs that need to be transported in the cold chain, and transport them all the way from Beijing to the handover point of the Dianshan Lake service area of the Shanghai Expressway G50. Upon arrival, Merck assisted the DTP pharmacy partner Shanghai Pharma Cloud Health Yiyao Pharmacy to send vehicles with Shanghai traffic qualifications to the Shanghai Expressway intersection, disassemble and assemble the medicines stored in refrigerated boxes and transport them back to Shanghai pharmacy for refrigerated storage.
In order to ensure the safety of patients’ medication, some anti-tumor immune drugs such as pembrolizumab need to be refrigerated throughout the process. Chain transportation, after the medicine arrives at the store, the pharmacy staff will check and put it into the warehouse as soon as possible. In order to solve the problem of emergency medication and delivery difficulties for special groups, many employees in the pharmacy of Shanghai Pharma Cloud Health and Yiyao have been stationed in the unit and have always been fighting the “epidemic” line.
Author: Tang Weijie
Editor: Yang Liu
Editor in charge : Rong Bing
*Wenhui’s exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.