Personnel hygiene in pharmaceuticals: Its importance and requirements for personnel involved in the manufacturing of quality medicines

Good personal hygiene is required in pharmaceutical industries to safeguard the product and avoid any type of contamination that effects quality of medicinal product. Individual persons are responsible for quality of a medicinal product and hence collectively can be termed as “personnel”. Even though controls are in place to manage equipment, incoming raw materials or packing materials, human beings are one of the main source of contamination. It is not enough to have a high tech state of the art pharmaceutical manufacturing facility and Quality control unit to release the raw materials, it is also very much essential to have well trained personnel to operate the equipment, to manufacture the quality product and handle the pharmaceutical product at every stage in manufacturing a dosage form. Therefore, all the personnel employed by the pharmaceutical sector should be well trained and educated on the importance of personnel hygiene. In this article, the authors have tried to outline importance of personnel hygiene and opined that there is a need to stress more on this subject especially at undergraduate levels of pharmacy curriculum. If this is included at undergraduate level, it will be easy to inculcate the best practices as per Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) for the freshers entering the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector.