IPPF is dedicated to serving its clients. Our Member Associations, their staff and millions of volunteers provided more than 175 million services to people around the world in 2015. Supporting people in the choices they make about their sexual and reproductive health and campaigning for their rights is our concern.
That is why we are currently undertaking a review in the UK which is investigating the way we store and deliver the products we supply to those clients.
Our clients, their health and their well-being are our absolute priority. For that reason we took very seriously a number of issues raised around how some of our supplies had been kept by our storage contractors at their facility in Milton Keynes, and how some of those supplies are then air freighted or shipped to Member Associations.
We found that a very small fraction of our supplies – approximately 0.2% of the commodities supplied annually - were stored for a time at temperatures outside their recommended range.
The fluctuation was not very large, and contacted all the manufacturers of the 10 products affected immediately to make sure we had their advice on the potential impact.
We are now confident that none of these products possessed the slightest risk to the health of any of our clients.
As a precaution we have decided to recall one line - 600 chlamydia testing kits, (tiny portion of our supply) sent to three member associations. They have been contacted, the kits are being withdrawn and retests will be offered to anyone tested using one of kits. I should stress again, that this is purely precautionary and there is no health risk at all with the kits.
We are still in communication with one manufacturer about a second line, but we have been assured by external experts that the product will be effective and we have no reason to think that is not the case.
I should also stress that no products stored in our UK warehouse are now outside their range and we are changing our supplier arrangements to ensure this remains the case in future.
We will continue to review our supplies management with a thorough investigation.
As I mentioned last week, we are also reviewing our shipping container policy. This involves consulting with colleagues and international experts about current industry standards to ensure that we are up to date with those.
Expert assessment so far is that there is no issue with any of the products we have shipped and we will share the final conclusions of the review as soon as it is completed. Until it concludes, as a precaution, we are shipping all supplies under temperature control.
(Updated on 3 June 2013)
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