Our public face has a fresh new look! Thanks to the efforts of the Communications Committee and our brilliant designers, we've refreshed our website. We hope you enjoy looking around.

For members, if you haven't yet engaged your suppliers in The Link, now is a great time to encourage them to access the platform and gain full access to our resources, support and dialogue. More information, and helpful resources to engage your suppliers, can be found in this member bulletin here.

If you have any comments or feedback please comment here or send to rosie.towe@carnstone.com.

This week, the PSCI held its first ever virtual Spring Meeting, reaching more members than ever! Over 140 individuals from our 44 member companies and partners connected from 22 countries around the world to join us for a day of compelling plenaries from experts, updates about our recent achievements and upcoming projects, and interactive discussions on pressing issues.

We heard about challenges and opportunities for the PSCI from our Chair Caroline O’Brien, hosted a rich session on climate change and tackling scope 3 emissions with contributions from AstraZeneca, Carnstone, and a lively panel discussion with colleagues from the Pharmaceutical Environment Group (PEG). Novartis delivered a thought-provoking talk on Blockchain, and PSCI Vice-Chair Manjit Singh introduced the upcoming PSCI Strategy Review, not to mention the regular updates from our fantastic committee chairs.

Finally, we were honoured to welcome Professor Sir David King, founder of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge University and former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, who shared his experience advising on the foot-and-mouth epidemic and climate-related issues in a fascinating opening talk.

All sessions were recorded and are available to members for replay on the event’s platform.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this first virtual meeting and we hope to see you all again very soon – online or in person!

The PSCI Secretariat

With our supply chain under pressure and with limitations on travel likely to continue, delivering our activities virtually is now more important than ever.

We are therefore delighted to announce the launch of The Link for Suppliers, our online platform and community for suppliers.

This online platform will connect, engage, and advance suppliers around responsible supply chain issues, helping them access the PSCI’s tools, resources and training, and to engage in active dialogue.

The Link for Suppliers works in a similar way to The Link for Members, with content specially tailored to suppliers. This means that every time a supplier logs into The Link (which we hope will be often), they’ll find news, activities and resources relevant to them, building awareness of the PSCI Principles and progressing their responsible supply chain knowledge. Importantly, they’ll also gain access to their own audit dashboard, giving visibility and control to suppliers, and ultimately encouraging wider, more frequent and faster sharing of audits. Finally, The Link is the best way for suppliers to stay up-to-date on updates to our SAQ and Audit tools.

For more information on The Link for Suppliers, please read our announcement (available here).

Engaging suppliers is vital and we encourage PSCI members to support in the following ways:

• Letting suppliers know The Link has launched: A template email (available to members here) for members to adapt and send to suppliers. It highlights the platform's benefits, and some of the useful resources and engaging content available on The Link.
• Making The Link part of other supplier communications: Building it into messages and key documents such as the Code of Conduct, encouraging suppliers to use and engage with the platform.

We thank members for their support.

The PSCI Team

On behalf of the Board and Communications Committee and with thanks to the Pharmaceuticals in the Environment (PiE)/ Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR) sub-team for their expert input, we are sharing the recently adopted PSCI Position Statement on PiE & AMR. It has been written to highlight the relevance of the PiE issue along the supply chain, to articulate PSCI's position on this high profile topic, and to help answer stakeholder inquiries. It includes an overview of all PSCI resources on PiE and AMR-related issues.

(Please click on the resource below to download the statement.)

What impact will #Covid19 have on pharmaceutical supply chains? Last week, we spoke to the team at @cphionline @Informa about the role that responsible practices in supply chains have in driving resilience.

"The criticality of responsible supply chain management has moved into sharp focus in recent years, and never more so than during the current global COVID-19 emergency,” said a representative from the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative (PSCI), whose 40+ member companies from across the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries work collaboratively to advance responsible supply chain practices. “Investing in supply chain responsibility ensures a more resilient, dependable supply chain in challenging times, focusing on what we know works best: safe and sanitary working environments, responsible environmental stewardship, fair labor practices and ongoing, open dialogue with suppliers.”

You can read the full article here.

Members are encouraged to Like and Share the news via our social channels on Twitter and LinkedIn.

We are pleased to launch the lightly refreshed PSCI Principles. The Principles underpin the work of PSCI, and form the basis of our mission. As such, we encourage all members, suppliers, and auditors to ensure they understand and are familiar with them.

The Principles have been in place, in their original form, since they were agreed by PSCI’s founding members in 2006. This is the first time they have been updated, and the refresh was motivated partly in recognition of the need for periodic review. Additionally, inputs from stakeholders during the 2018-2020 Strategy Review, and from the Advisory Panel, indicated the need to update or add wording on certain issues and topics.

The refresh followed a consultative process, with member feedback invited, and culminating in a formal vote including all members, which took place at the AGM in Fall 2019.

The refreshed Principles take effect for members from 1st January 2020. To ensure the Principles are reflected in member practices, the first accountability questions will be in the annual member accountability survey, due in September 2020; any non-compliance to the refreshed Principles will be raised during member calls taking place in February 2021.

The more significant changes to the Principles are highlighted below:

• Strengthened references to human rights, and emphasized PSCI’s commitment in this area

• Adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) as the internationally agreed standard for the corporate responsibility to respect human rights

• Strengthened content on anti-bribery and corruption, data protection, freely chosen employment, and health & safety

• New clauses on patient safety, conflicts of interest, resource management and sustainable sourcing.

As ever, the Principles are made available freely and publicly to anyone with an interest in responsible supply chains for our sector. To view the Principles, visit them in our Resources library.

Translated versions of the Principles in key languages will be made available in Spring 2020.

Any comments to the refreshed Principles, or their implementation, should be submitted to the Secretariat.

Recently we published an article about PSCI and sustainable packaging on Pharmaceutical Manufacturing and Packing Sourcer (PMPS) August 2019. PMPS is a specialist journal designed to provide worldwide coverage of a range of topics relating to the pharmaceutical manufacturing and packaging sector, with around 10K readers mainly in Europe and North America.

In this article we shared PSCI’s approach on promoting responsible practices via PSCI principles and audits sharing project, insights from the audits and case study from PSCI member company. See below audit findings on different topics among packaging suppliers; around half of all audit findings are related to health and safety, especially worker protection, occupational health, and process safety.

Thanks to member company West, who provided their insights to promoting responsible practices in packaging.

Read the article here, page 68-69.

Enric Bosch from Boehringer Ingelheim, one of our PSCI members, and co-Chair of the PSCI Communications Committee, recently spoke at an industry event about sustainability in Pharma supply chains, Salon Internacional de Logistica in Barcelona.
The SIL Barcelona conference focused on Logistics, Transport, Intralogistics and Supply Chain in Southern Europe. Enric shared PSCI collaboration as an example of good practice where different companies in the same sector work together to build up a more sustainable supply chain.

Last week we hosted another great webinar on the antimicrobial resistance, hosted by Daniel Caldwell (Global Director, Environmental and Occupational Toxicology at Johnson & Johnson) and Neil Parke (Global HSE Consultant at Lilly).

We were thrilled to see so many members and suppliers tuning in, but in case you missed it, you can watch the webinar here.

The slide deck can also be downloaded here.