The Journey Of 3 Million Bags Of Traditional Chinese Medicine Soup: From The Decocting Workshop To The Shelter Hospital

On the morning of March 2nd, in the center of the nine letter medicine group of Jiuzhou Tong Pharmaceutical Group, 136 decocting machines were working at full capacity to intensify the production tasks on that day. In this industrial production workshop, the special smell of Chinese medicinal herbs is distributing, and the heat of a machine is constantly emerging.

After 30 minutes of soaking and 1 hours of frying, the soup was put out and quickly sealed, labelled, packaged, and pipelined. Finally, it was loaded on a specially built platform and sent to Wuhan's large shelter, medical institutions, epidemic prevention and control front-line, to treat a large number of new crown pneumonia patients.

Yu Yanhong, member of the central steering group, member of the Party committee of the health and Health Committee, and the party secretary and deputy director of the Chinese medicine bureau pointed out that adhering to the combination of Chinese and Western medicine is an important feature of the Chinese new crown virus fight. A large number of clinical practice confirmed that the effect of combining traditional Chinese and Western medicine in treating the new crown pneumonia is affirmative and effective. Early intervention of Chinese medicine and combination of Chinese and Western medicine is an important way to improve cure rate and reduce mortality rate. It is also a major feature of this treatment. So far, in the third, fourth, fifth and six edition of the national diagnosis and treatment plan, Chinese medicine has been included in the diagnosis and treatment plan, and the prescriptions for different stages of prevention, treatment and rehabilitation have been launched.

With the rapid growth of demand, it is the mission of a batch of pharmaceutical manufacturers in China to scale the production of these prescriptions with high quality and quantity. Up to now, only the enterprises of Jiuzhou Tong and Guo Yao holding have been involved in the supply of Chinese medicine only.

"Lending" machines to ensure production

In February 5th, the national Wei Jian administration and the Chinese medicine administration released the prescription of Chinese medicine. Since then, the application of Chinese medicine has been gradually increased in the treatment of patients in Wuhan, and the implementation of the "5+3" program, namely, 5 Chinese patent medicines and 3 traditional Chinese medicine, has been completed. The distribution of 5 proprietary Chinese medicines in the main urban area and the far urban area of Wuhan is carried out by Kyushu logistics company, and 3 Chinese herbal medicine, 2 and 3 Fang Youjiu. State nine letter Chinese medicine company produces, decoct and distribute.

As a matter of fact, it is not just started that the Wuhan new crown epidemic situation is blocked by the supply of traditional Chinese medicine.

In January 23rd, Hubei province released two Chinese medicine prevention parties. "At that time, the demand for Chinese medicine in the market began to surge." Nine Zhu Zhiguo, general manager of traditional Chinese medicine, recalled that the first wave of demand appeared before January 29th. For this reason, the company quickly stockpiling inventory. "The first few days are very tense, and there is a certain stock of standing stock." But there are only one or two days in stock for some medicinal materials, and all the purchasers started to step up procurement throughout the country. Zhu Zhiguo said.

With the development of epidemic situation, traffic control and traffic are not available in many places. "Our people can't get in. People with raw materials can't get out." Zhu Zhiguo said that logistics transportation of raw materials is a challenge. "At that time, many people did not want to enter Wuhan, one is worried about infection, the two is to go back and quarantine for 14 days." Zhu Zhiguo said.

In addition, the transportation of some raw materials is thousands of kilometers, and passes through several cities or provinces, and many places require local permission. "Remember that once a buyer was unable to pass through a city car, there was no way to call the local government's mayors hotline, but fortunately the police car came to us. Zhu Zhiguo said.

The cost of procurement during the epidemic has also risen sharply, and the price of many herbs has doubled or more. "But the Kyushu Tong Chinese medicine plate is a layout of the whole industry chain. We first digested the pressure of rising costs inside, but the cost of the medicine center still rose, and the procurement cost of all kinds of raw materials increased by about 10%-50%." Zhu Zhiguo introduced.

During the epidemic period, nine Chinese medicines purchased 255 Chinese medicinal materials, purchased 728 batches, and purchased more than 1600 tons. Altogether, they shipped 108 times from the origin and market of the medicinal herbs and traveled about 100000 kilometers. In addition to meeting the supply of Hubei, we also supply 33 Chinese herbal medicine demand enterprises nationwide for the supply of anti epidemic varieties.

After solving the problem of raw materials, production capacity and workers are another problem that needs to be solved.

The first nine letters were only dozens of decocting machines. "There are about 30-40 bags per hour." Zhu Zhiguo said, as early as the demand appeared, the decoction center was running at full capacity, but still unable to meet the supply demand at that time.

Emergency procurement machine is the first way to solve the problem. Nine letter of Chinese medicine to Beijing a pharmaceutical production enterprise emergency procurement 30 units. "But logistics from Beijing to Wuhan was not smooth at that time." Zhu Zhiguo said that it was too late to continue to buy in large quantities. Later, the nine letter of Chinese medicine transported the relatively idle machine in Jiangsu to Wuhan. "After that, the idle machines in Henan, Chengdu and other places were demolished, and the scale of the decocting machine finally reached 136."

How to return to work for employees who have come home on holiday is also a difficult point.

"Up to now, the whole Kyushu Tong Group has invested about 18 thousand people in the work of fighting against the new crown. Zhu Zhiguo said that some employees ride bicycles for more than ten hours, some employees come back on foot, and there are various kinds of "rubbing cars".

Despite all the staff's response, the manpower is still tight, and the Kyushu group sends staff support. "We only need dozens of people to run normally under normal operation." Zhu Zhiguo said, but so far, including group and nine letter Chinese medicine workers have 954 people involved in the production of Chinese medicine soup.

At this time, the machine in place has been running all day, with only 2 hours of rest per day. The front-line staff will fall in two shifts, the shift from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the next night shift will arrive at 5 a.m. on the second day. "Now more than 50 employees are engaged in the compatibility, decocting and packaging of Chinese medicine every day, and the automatic filling machine is realized." Zhu Zhiguo said Nissan could reach 7-8 bags at its peak, and now it has reached 2-3 bags.

Tight supply

February 5th is the most stressful day for Zhu Zhiguo.

"At that time, we received urgent tasks and needed to provide Soup for all the shelter hospitals in Wuhan on that day." Zhu Zhiguo recalls that under normal circumstances, it takes at least half a day to produce a batch of soup products, but the day's work will end until noon. Zhu Zhiguo said, after getting the prescription, the first time to start the raw material allocation, all the stock varieties will be transferred to the decoction center. Although it is not clear that the patient should be given the medicine on the night, "but we think we can get the treatment sooner if we want to get it earlier." Zhu Zhiguo suspended all the other business of the staff in the pharmacy center, focusing on the production of this batch.

At that time, according to the requirements, the nine letter Chinese medicine only needed to focus on sending the drugs to the designated units at designated locations, but the designated units had no car distribution, so they took the initiative to undertake the task of distribution through Kyushu's own logistics and distribution system.

Emergency does not mean quality relaxation.

At the decocting site, the nine letter of Chinese medicine formulated the standardized procedures and operation procedures for the decocting of the decoction, and strictly monitored the key quality control points. "We are specialized, private and private line management." Zhu Zhiguo said, each prescription set up a separate ingredient room, in the ingredients room staff will review each prescription of the name and quantity of medicine, to prevent the error rate, must be genuine, and there is a physical examination of nine samples.

In the decocting machine, each line is decocting separately, so as to avoid the rampant situation between the squares. In addition, the quality assurance of Chinese herbal medicine must be soaked before decocting drugs, and its effective ingredients can come out. "No matter how busy we are, we must soak for at least 30 minutes and cook for over 1 hours (including heating up time)." Zhu Zhiguo introduced that each production line also used color identification to distinguish the lines of different products, and set up special people to patrol around the site to train personnel to prevent errors and confusion.

"We now have three traditional Chinese medicine decoction, No. 2 Decoction (Qingfei detoxification Decoction) and No. 3 prescription belong to the treatment party, mainly distributed to designated hospitals, shelter hospitals and community isolation points, for the treatment of suspected, light, ordinary and heavy patients, is also one of the most important work at present. At the same time, it also produces some preventive agents, mainly for distribution to health care, public security and other enterprises and institutions, as well as the needs of the general public. " Zhu Zhiguo introduced.

As of March 3rd, Jiuzhou Tong's nine letter Chinese medicine group has provided more than 3 million bags of traditional Chinese medicine decoction to the whole society, including 508 thousand bags of Qingfei detoxification Decoction and so on, with a total benefit of about 270 thousand people.

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