"Compliance is the 'Rule Book' That Gives Us the Privilege to Make Medicine"

Christina Mazzella, Vice President of Global Quality Compliance at Teva Global Operations, explains why compliance is such a big part of what we make and talks about our commitment to patients and partners.

Maintaining a high level of quality is everyone's responsibility in Teva. To achieve it, we must have compliance in our minds. Compliance is our "rule book," a set of regulations and expectations we must follow in order to have the privilege to manufacture life-saving and life-sustaining medicines and products.

Global Quality Compliance, the team I lead, is a team that fosters our quality and compliance continuous improvement journey, setting direction through our Quality Management System and minimizing risk.

Compliance is doing things the right way. It is the standards we must have in place in order to operate. The standards we are living up to and holding ourselves responsible for help us guarantee that every time we make a medicine or product, it'll function exactly as we intended it to. To create these standards, we take guidance and inputs from a variety of information sources; i.e. regulatory agencies, industry groups and forums, and interpret them into our Quality Management System.

We hold ourselves to a high level of compliance. By doing so, we can consistently deliver high quality medicines and products that meet the needs of patients and healthcare systems. Every employee and every function has an important part in maintaining the privilege of making medicines and products, and getting them to the patients and healthcare providers.

Implementing the right culture is critical. It leads our teams to do things the way they should be done, repeatedly, according to our standards. Culture means speaking up if something is not as it should be and collaborating with experts from different teams to deliver the best results. It affects our way of working and our mind-sets, and creates a stronger connection to the work we do for our patients.

When I think of Teva's values and the products we make, I really resonate with "making our families proud." If I spend my day working on something, I want to know that it is worth it, that I'm doing something for someone who's sick and needs this medicine or product. This is what drives me and makes my family proud.

Quality is doing your job right, and when it comes to quality, compliance is the framework in which you're doing it. One can't live without the other. Only a combination between quality and compliance can work and enable us to deliver the results we want.

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