The Best Practices of Monitoring Med Fridge’s Temperature

The Best Practices of Monitoring Med Fridge’s Temperature

Tracking the internal temperature of your medical fridge is necessary to keep the constituent medication in potent states. If you are a healthcare lab or pharmacy owner, you are committed to a mandatory task; ensuring your medical fridge temperature remaining within the prescribed range. That brings forth the question; how often should you check the temperature? This is precisely what w will discuss in this article. Apparently intending to help you with an effective schedule to serve as the best practices. The best practices of monitoring Med. fridge’s temperature.

Why Should You Monitor Your Medical Fridge’s Temperature? 

The need for monitoring your medical fridge’s temperature arises from two factors. So, let us get acquainted with the factors.

Avoiding Degradation

Medications should be kept at the prescribed temperature ranges because inappropriate temperatures can potentially cause damages to them, or their safety and effectiveness could get compromised. Moreover, the wrong temperature can degrade medicines and develop impurities. The danger is that the contaminants are not visible, but they can cause serious complications when consumed. As such, you need to store them at the prescribed temperature to avoid their potency. 

Avoiding Untimely Expiry

The wrong temperature will make medications expire untimely. So, you should not store them at room temperature but in a medical fridge. 

If medications get exposed to inappropriate temperature, they can change their chemicals’ molecular form. As a result, the medications can start to decompose, becoming less effective and toxic. It can also lead to harmful effects on the consumers. Therefore, you should store them in medical fridges to extend their longevity. With the temperature monitoring feature, medical fridges allow you to keep an eye on the temperature range. You can take corrective action when the temperature goes out of the prescribed range. 

The Right Temperature Range for a Medical Fridge

You must know about the temperature range that you can consider suitable for your medical fridge. 

In this context, it will be helpful to look at what the Center for Disease Control (CDC) says. The regulatory body recommends medical fridges that store vaccines and other temperature-sensitive medications should be maintained at a temperature range of 36 to 40 degrees F. Any temperature beyond the range is out-of-range temperature, which mandates temperature restoration to the recommended range. 

There is More to Know About Monitoring Medical Fridge Temperature Daily

Although the primary need for regularly monitoring your medical fridge’s temperature is maintaining the potency of the stored medicines, there are more aspects to know.

The process of monitoring the temperature of your medical fridge spans beyond maintaining the proper cold chain. Instead, it involves a set of best practices about which the following discussion is about.

With a medical fridge, you are assured of the maintenance of the right temperature for storing medicines. And modern medical fridges bear temperature monitoring devices to alert you when the temperature goes out of the prescribed range. 

But, if you leave everything for your fridge to do, that will be a bad practice. So you also have an influential role to play to streamline the process. 

You cannot undermine the need to check the temperature regularly. You have to do that and maintain the temperature readings in a log. 

Many activities can change the temperature of your fridge from the prescribed range. For example, when your staff opens the fridge door to take out a vaccine to administer to a patient, warm air can enter the fridge to raise the temperature levels, which might damage your medication stock. Likewise, if your staff accidentally leaves the door open, the temperature in the fridge can get warm to compromise the stored medicines in your fridge. 

So, you should monitor the temperature frequently to ensure that your stored medicines are safe.  

Let us make things more clear. Suppose you routinely check the temperature at 8 am and noon. But one of your staff members forgot to close the door after taking out medicine. As a result, the temperature in the fridge went up to say 52 degrees F, risking the potency of the stored medicines. Later, the staff came back and closed the door, realizing his mistake. But, when you check the temperature at noon, you will find the range in the right temperature. 

You will miss out on the accidental temperature fluctuation that happened without your knowledge in such a situation because there will be no record of the temperature fluctuation that might have compromised the stored medications. As a result, you might unknowingly administer compromised medicines to patients, who will eventually lose trust in your pharmacy. 

So, the question arises of how to avoid such accidental situations. The solution lies in monitoring the temperature frequently, say, four to five times a day, or maybe hourly, if possible. 

You can regard the following three steps as the best practices of temperature monitoring for your medical fridge:

Checking the maximum and minimum temperatures

Check the coldest and warmest temperatures after you last reset the temperature of your medical fridge. The most critical times are at the starting and closing of the workday. It will also help if you check in between at a time of your choice. Note down the readings after every reading on a paper or spreadsheet. 

Resetting

Reset the temperature after every check and logging of maximum and minimum temperatures. For example, ensure that you reset the temperature of 40 degrees C.

Continuous Monitoring

Make the temperature monitoring a continuous process. Check the temperature every time your staff accesses the freezer interior. It will help to discover any temperature fluctuations due to the opening of the door.

Conclusion

While temperature monitoring is necessary to keep your medication stock at a potent state, having the right medical fridge is also equally important. Therefore, do not fail to invest in a medical fridge manufactured by a trusted and reputed company.