[Histonet] A little temperture monitoring debate

[Morken, Timothy]

We had our Joint Commission inspection today (no deficiencies!) and the inspector was pressing us to do temperature monitoring in a different way. For chemicals in fridges and freezers we use the manufacturer recommendation of temperature range to set our ranges. Typically for a fridge it is 2C to 8C. That seems pretty standard from datasheets I have. So we set our range at 2-8 on our automated system and then have a 30 min delay if it goes over before an alert sounds. That is to prevent spurious out of range alerts just because someone opened the door for a bit longer than usual. And reagents are not going to warm up instantly either. The probe is in a liquid bottle so will warm up time will be similar to a reagent. Anyway, he thought we should set the ranges narrower so it alerts before it reaches the out of range mark. He felt that if the fridge goes out of range for any time AT ALL then we need to prove all the reagents are still good. He was satisfied with daily control review of immuno stains and said that would prove the reagents work. But I also pointed out to him that we take the diluted reagents out of the fridge and have them on the stainer for up to 8 hours every day at room temperature with no problems. He didn't really have an answer to that but said the manufacturer  should consider that in their literature. We don't have too many alerts and those that do occur are usually due to a door not closed are resolved quickly.

I'm wondering what others think and do. We had debate this internally when we set up the automated system and considered wider ranges to avoid too many out of range alerts due to opening the doors many times daily, but never considered narrower ranges. We decided to go with the manufacturer ranges in order to be consistent and not have to defend whatever arbitrary narrow or wide range we picked. At least with the manufacturer recommendations we have something on paper to point to.


Tim Morken
Supervisor, Electron Microscopy/Neuromuscular Special Studies
Department of Pathology
UC San Francisco Medical Center