A clipboard on the fridge door
There is a sheet taped to the fridge door. Each morning someone reads the current, minimum and maximum temperatures, writes them down, resets the thermometer and initials the box. On a good week every box is filled. On a busy week there are gaps, and someone fills them in later from memory, which is worse than a gap.
Then Monday morning comes and the maximum reading is well above where it should be. When did it happen? For how long? Was it the door left ajar on Saturday afternoon, or a power cut on Sunday? The sheet cannot tell you.
The limits of a once-a-day reading
A daily reading is a snapshot. The min and max help, but they do not tell you when or for how long. If the reset is forgotten, the next reading is meaningless. If the pharmacy is shut for two days, nobody reads anything.
And a reading on paper cannot warn anyone. By the time someone sees it, the stock has been in whatever conditions it was in for as long as it was.
What a missed excursion costs
| What goes wrong | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Gaps in the log | Your records look incomplete when someone asks for them |
| Excursions found late | Stock may have been affected with no clear timeline |
| No timeline | Decisions about affected stock have less to go on |
| Several fridges | Each has its own sheet and its own gaps |
What you do about stock after an excursion is a decision for your pharmacist under your SOPs and the manufacturers' information. We do not advise on that. What we provide is a fuller record to base the decision on.
Sensors, alerts and a proper record
- Wireless temperature sensors placed in each fridge, recording at a regular interval you choose, around the clock.
- A gateway in the pharmacy that sends readings to a secure online dashboard. If the internet drops, sensors keep a buffer and upload when it returns, where the hardware supports it.
- Alerts by text or email to named people when a reading moves outside the range you set, with a delay option so a door opened for a minute does not wake anyone.
- Acknowledgement of each alert, so you can see who saw it and what they did.
- Daily and monthly records that can be printed or exported, showing continuous readings, min and max, and any excursions with their duration.
- A manual check option on a tablet, if your procedures still want a daily human reading alongside the sensor.
We use established sensor hardware rather than building our own, and we choose based on your fridges and building. Our part is the setup, the alerting rules and the records.
What changes on a Monday morning
Instead of a mystery maximum, you have a graph. If something happened over the weekend, you see exactly when it started, how long it lasted and when it recovered. More often, you already know, because the alert went to someone on Saturday.
The daily log fills itself. Nobody has to invent a reading after the fact, and the record is there when an inspector, commissioner or your own superintendent asks for it.
Is your fridge log like this?
- Readings are written on a sheet taped to the fridge
- Weekends and bank holidays leave gaps
- You have found out-of-range maximums with no idea when they happened
- Nobody is alerted when a fridge fails out of hours
- Several fridges each have their own paper log