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Legislation has been implemented by various state governments in Australia requiring chemists and pharmacists to keep dangerous pharmaceuticals in a secure safe. It can be difficult to find the most suitable drug safe constructed to comply with the legislation in your state, especially when the standards and requirements varies in every state. While one drug safe may be accepted in Victoria, it may not pass the specification required by a Queensland Health Inspector. In this very complex situation, the assistance of an experienced drug safe expert would be very useful. A good place to start is to gather more information before you get your first drug safe. This blog gives you more information on factors to be taken into account when getting your drug safe installed.
A lot of consideration has been taken by each State when they wrote up their specific requirements for the storage of addictive and dangerous medications. Take Queensland as an example, at the time the Queensland Health Act was written, a lot of attention was given on the construction and design requirements of the drug safe. It is essential to have a high quality drug safe installed if you need to store dangerous drugs and medicine.
In addition to this, the State regulation specifies in detail on how a pharmaceutical safe must be secured to the wall or floor. When it is installed and bolted properly, it ensures thieves and burglars can’t remove it easily and steal it. Unfortunately, as the section on the bolting of the drug safe was written about 20 years ago, they didn’t predicted that many pharmacies nowadays are located in shopping malls and have plasterboard walls. This has made it harder to keep pharmaceutical drug cabinets secure.
Based on our expertise, knowledge and experience, the simplest way we found to securely install a drug safe is to anchor it to the concrete floor. This is the best option if a concrete floor is available, but often we find ourselves facing situations where a wooden floor is involved, or the only place the safe will fit on site is on top of the dispensary platform at the pharmacy shop. It is true that the majority of chemists’ work is done from a raised area in the back of the chemist shop. This platform is often built of chipboard, so how to install this securely requires the expertise of an experienced safe installer. Through our 35 years of working in the industry supplying and installing drug safes, Safeguard Safes has never been condemned by the Health Department of any States in Australia. We always make sure your safe is installed in the way that is compliant to the requirements in your States.
Apart from complying with the State regulations, we also do our best to make installation plans that are tailored to your specific needs. We have been asked in the past to install the medication cabinet at a friendly height for one of the disabled employees on site. In response to this request, we placed the drug safe on an elevated platform. Prior to the installation, we had extensive conversation with the Queensland Department of Health obtaining the authorisation to install the drug safe this way for this particular situation, the end result was ideal for all parties.
If you have any questions about drug safe installation in any States around Australia, don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and call us today on 1300 764 971. If you’re not sure about which safe to get, we can also assist you with that. We have the largest selection of safes online for you to choose from, and a large showroom located in our head office in Melbourne displaying a range of safes for you to choose from. All our drug safes, both new and preused, are compliant to the Medicines, Poisons and Therapeutic Goods Regulation 2008 and the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substance Regulations 2017. For more information on drug safe compliance, click here to read more.
