Specialist pharmaceutical packaging company August Faller has made it possible to combine a package leaflet with a patient alert card in a sealed film.
Increasingly, cartons for some pharmaceutical products contain information carriers, such as patient alert cards and medical alert cards, alongside the standard regulatory leaflet.
Patients carry these cards to provide information quickly for hospitals and doctors in an emergency.
August Faller develops and produces solutions for combined patient information leaflets in a variety of forms, including banderols, labels or adhesive dots.
In addition, a new an outsert can be combined with a patient alert card in up to three languages and then sealed in film. The film protects the combined information carriers from dirt and wear.
The low shrink tension of the film means that the product remains flat. It is perforated to facilitate opening.
Because the combined leaflets can be dispensed into cartons like a single product, two steps can be eliminated; folding a leaflet and inserting an additional information carrier. This spares the cost of a dispensing unit on the packaging line.
The combined product has a tolerance of one millimetre. The company attained this by processing the original formats directly on the assembly line.
The two information carriers are first placed precisely on top of each other, then multiple high-resolution camera systems ensure that the correct information carriers are precisely combined.
“The system recognises faulty products and shunts them pneumatically towards the shrink tunnel without interrupting the production flow,” said Christiana Klüppelberg, application and process engineer.
Strong seams are produced in the downstream packaging machine fitted with a shrink tunnel. The seams seal the film but are fine enough not to affect the product tolerance.
