What you will find in a SenseAnywhere temperature mapping report
Withnell Sensors- distributing wireless temperature sensors to Canada
Storage of pharmaceuticals
Pharmacy fridge temperature monitoring is an important and essential practice to ensure the safety of the medicines stored. Temperatures in pharmacy fridges as well as rooms in which medicines are stored, at a minimum, should be checked on a daily basis. Pharmacy fridges, for most medicines that require refrigeration should set to between 2°C and 8°C. Medicines that can be stored at ambient, or room temperatures should be not exceed 25°C. Patient safety and medication efficiency is, of course, the key objective for manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, and healthcare professionals administering medicines to patients.
This article will describe:
- Typical storage of medicines within pharmacy fridges
- Best practices for medicine fridge monitoring
- Manual and digital monitoring methods
- Our solution
Storage in a pharmaceutical refrigerator
A pharmaceutical fridge is required for the storage of refrigerated medicinal products. The air within a pharmacy fridge is circulated by a fan; this creates a uniform temperature within the fridge and an accelerated temperature pull down after the door has been opened compared with standard commercial fridges.
Typically, pharmacy refrigerators can be locked, and some have the option of either a visual or audio alarm to alert staff in the event of temperature deviations, usually if the fridge door hasn’t been shut correctly. Many pharmacy fridges also have glass doors or windows at the front, allowing greater visibility of stock levels as well as preventing the storage of non-medicinal products within the fridge which could lead to cross contamination.
How should you check your medicine fridge temperature?
As a minimum, a daily check provides you with some assurance that the medicines are being stored at the right temperature. However, it is best practice to log temperatures at hourly intervals. This is because fridge temperatures fluctuate during the day, as staff open the fridge to take out medication to administer to a patient. Therefore, if you are only recording your pharmacy fridge conditions daily, these fluctuations will be missed. For monitoring purposes, temperature should be recorded by a calibrated electronic min/max thermometer or temperature sensor. The MHRA advise to measure pharmacy fridge temperature with a sensor with an accuracy of ±0.5C.
Monitoring medicine fridge temperatures manually or digitally
There are two different ways a pharmacy can approach the checking of a medicine fridge temperature.
Manual checks
A dedicated staff member or members can be assigned to manually check the fridge temperature. This usually involves a thermometer or temperature sensor with a real time display, so that readings can be taken.
However, there are numerous setbacks to this approach. Firstly, in larger organisations this can take up a significant amount of staff’s time, which may also lead to increased staffing costs. Human error also comes in to play- there might be inconsistencies with the regularity of readings or readings might not be noted accurately. This also generates a risk in that transparency- data could be tampered with to conform to regulations, rather than with patient interest in mind. Furthermore, this doesn’t actually prevent any temperature excursions- as previously mentioned, most pharmacy fridges have an alarm for temperature excursions, however, for double contingency it is best to have a backup alarm. And finally, this requires the opening of the pharmacy fridge door- which further disrupts the temperature stability within the storage unit.
Digital medicine fridge temperature monitoring
Choosing a digital solution to monitor your medicine fridge removes these setbacks. A digital temperature monitoring system essentially does the work for you. Recording intervals can be set to log pharmacy fridge temperatures automatically. These recordings will also be logged, so no manual intervention is required- removing human error, staffing time and potential data tampering issues. Digital temperature monitoring systems also come with alarm settings, so parameters can be set for the data loggers at, for example 3°C and 7°C. This means that the problem can be rectified before breaching the medicines storage temperature requirements. Digital solutions mean patient safety is ensured and compliance is a breeze, through the complete data history reports.
Our monitoring solution
We have a market leading solution for pharmaceutical temperature monitoring, used by industry leaders across pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Our system- the SenseAnywhere Airosensor, comes with an abundance of benefits such as a 10 year battery life, unmatched software and 24/7 smart device data access. To learn more about all of the benefits of this system follow the link below.
