Inventory reconciliation

[amblanki]

I was wondering if anyone has a wonderfully easy way of reconciling inventory.  Currently, we print our available inventory sheets from Soft and then pull racks out out and check off the units.  We have 800 plus units of red cells and we reconcile weekly.  

[David Saikin]

when i worked in a large BB (700+ beds) we did the same thing.  Printout.  One guy at the refrig and a 2nd with the list.

we had about 600u in stock.

[John C. Staley]

I'm curious, often do the counts not match and you have to undertake an exhaustive search for figure out what happened? 

[dcubed]

IMO, it is important to reconcile inventory on a daily basis.  It seems to become exponentially more difficult to fix something when more time has passed.

[David Saikin]

5 hours ago, dcubed said:

IMO, it is important to reconcile inventory on a daily basis.  It seems to become exponentially more difficult to fix something when more time has passed.

That's the truth.  As I recall, we did that every other night. 

[amblanki]

On 11/5/2020 at 7:44 AM, John C. Staley said:

I'm curious, often do the counts not match and you have to undertake an exhaustive search for figure out what happened? 

Not often at all with reds.  It's usually with FFP (and not often) when someone forgets to discard a broken unit, etc.  

[amblanki]

On 11/5/2020 at 8:12 AM, dcubed said:

IMO, it is important to reconcile inventory on a daily basis.  It seems to become exponentially more difficult to fix something when more time has passed.

Sounds good in theory, but it just isn't practical with our inventory levels and staffing and also given the fact that we don't run into that many issues.  If we started to see a trend I would absolutely do something different.  We do reconcile our remote refrigerators on a daily basis. 

[Cliff]

Yikes, I can't imagine.  Our RBC inventory is about 1000.  We run a short date list daily.  We find units with X days remaining (I believe 3) and put them in a special place for immediate use.  We also release units from patients nightly.  One of those two processes finds units that may be a failure to issue in the computer.

With usage as high as we have, invariably units go missing.  About once a year we lose a unit or two.  We have an investigation process, and if that fails, we make them as lost.

[John C. Staley]

1 hour ago, Cliff said:

Yikes, I can't imagine.  Our RBC inventory is about 1000.  We run a short date list daily.  We find units with X days remaining (I believe 3) and put them in a special place for immediate use.  We also release units from patients nightly.  One of those two processes finds units that may be a failure to issue in the computer.

With usage as high as we have, invariably units go missing.  About once a year we lose a unit or two.  We have an investigation process, and if that fails, we make them as lost.

I do enjoy simple and practical.  We have a tendency to over complicate just about everything!

[amblanki]

On 11/7/2020 at 6:46 AM, Cliff said:

Yikes, I can't imagine.  Our RBC inventory is about 1000.  We run a short date list daily.  We find units with X days remaining (I believe 3) and put them in a special place for immediate use.  We also release units from patients nightly.  One of those two processes finds units that may be a failure to issue in the computer.

With usage as high as we have, invariably units go missing.  About once a year we lose a unit or two.  We have an investigation process, and if that fails, we make them as lost.

Yes, we do the same as far as daily inventory work goes.  We also have an investigation process with about 15 steps or so before something is "unaccounted" for.  I was just hoping someone figured out a way to use a computer program that you could scan the unit and reconcile the list electronically as there are far more tech savvy people than I.  

[R1R2]

Is this a regulatory requirement?    We never reconcile.    We do pull daily short date lists, expired lists and reconcile new shipments with invoice and LIS .  We rarely have a unit go missing and we can always backtrack and find it.  

 

[DebbieL]

We print a report each night that tells us how many of each type of product are available. We just count the number of each and it almost always matches. We can usually get this done without the alarm sounding.  If our counts doesn't match what the computer says we have, then we dig into the weeds to see which unit is missing. Then we print the list of all the ISBT numbers to find the one in question.