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J&J Chief Medical Officer Talks Package Design Considerations

In part 2 of this two-part series, we delve into design considerations, including caregiver burnout, as well as some of Dr. Kuffner’s tips for those within and outside the packaging community to prevent unsupervised medication ingestions in kids.


Quick hits:

  • Dr. Ed Kuffner, chief medical officer at J&J Consumer Health, is an experienced emergency physician and a medical toxicologist who’s witnessed firsthand when children come in for treatment of accidental unsupervised ingestions.
  • Parent, caregiver, and clinician burnout is something that designers should be factoring in. When looking into the root causes of accidental ingestions, it’s a continuous journey among patients, healthcare professionals, industry, and consumer groups.
  • When new products come onto the market—including THC and supplements—it’s key to understand how consumers interact with the products/packaging.
  • Dr. Kuffner offer tips we can all incorporate to prevent kids from accessing medication: be careful where purses and backpacks are placed, ensure meds are placed back in high cabinets after usage as post-use is a particularly risky time, and use dosing devices that come with medications because household tools are inaccurate.

Related to this episode:  

Listen to the story here:

Read article   Read the transcript below:

Keren Sookne: I recently interviewed Dr. Ed Kuffner, chief medical officer at Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health. Throughout his career in—including time in the emergency department and poison center—Ed has been passionate about patient safety and has worked with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders to tackle complex public health issues such as preventing medication errors, accidental unsupervised ingestions, misuse, abuse and overdose.

In Part 1, we discussed the winner of their recent QuickFire design challenge in the importance of unit dose packaging, and I’ll link to that video below. 

In part 2 today, we delve into design considerations, including caregiver burnout, as well as some of Dr. Kuffner’s tips that we can all heed for helping to prevent accidental unsupervised medication ingestions among children. 

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