The safety of our products is the bedrock of our corporate responsibility. When used properly, they should pose no risk to patients, consumers, customers, or the environment. To ensure this across all three of our business sectors, we have implemented globally applicable policies, standards and processes.
We steer our global processes for chemical product safety via our Group-wide Product Safety Chemicals policy, which covers all relevant national and international regulations of the chemical industry. These include, among others, the Globally Harmonised System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS) and its implementation in regional and national legislation, as well as the EU chemicals regulation REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals).
Patient and consumer safety is our number-one priority in everything we do. Throughout the entire lifecycle of our medicines and consumer health products, we provide patients, consumers and physicians with up-to-date product safety information based on risk-benefit evaluations. To this end, our experts process safety-relevant information from various sources such as clinical trials, adverse reaction reports and scientific literature. Our Global Chief Medical Officer is the voice of the patients; he bears ultimate responsibility for the safety of our biopharmaceuticals, with support from our Medical Safety and Ethics Board (MSEB). Our Global Drug Safety unit continuously monitors and evaluates the safety and risk-benefit ratio of our biological medicines worldwide (pharmacovigilance). For our Consumer Health products, this function is performed by the Global Product Safety unit. Overall responsibility for the safety of our over-the-counter products falls under the Chief Medical Officer of our Consumer Health business, supported by the Safety & Labelling Committee (SLC). For products in our Allergopharma business, we have developed comprehensive clinical efficacy and safety profiles that are continuously updated. To guarantee the safety of our patients, we have established a global pharmacovigilance system that we continually work to optimize.
Through our compliance policies for our Biopharma and Consumer Health businesses, we set standards for responsible pharmaceutical marketing practices. These aim to ensure that patients and healthcare professionals have access to the relevant information, and that patients receive effective treatment.