Good morning, Blood Bankers. I work at a Level 1 Trauma center and we just purchased 4 of these coolers. Has anyone had a successful validation plan? If so do you mind sharing. TIA. I am trying to find the most efficient way to validate and make sure we are covering every extreme possible.

We have the Max-Q blue (smaller) and red (larger) coolers.  Just some thoughts............  not sure what the MTP coolers use as their coolant, but the gel packs that they send/recommend for the blue smaller coolers are CRAP!  We have replaced all our gel packs with "green arctic ice" blocks.  More expensive up front for sure, but, well worth it in the long run.  Our gel packs were only lasting about 3 months meaning every time we replaced a set it had to be validated.......we were constantly validating! Anywhoooo...........

We use expired blood products (using minimum blood volume as you determine) set up the coolers as if they're going out and put a downladable global thermometer probe in the cooler between the units.  The cooler is then left (here, at minimum 10 hours) in a spot in our lab - usually for about 12 hours.  At the end of the time, we download the Temp report from the thermometer and determine the # of hours the cooler was within the appropriate range (we use 1-6C).  Our blue MaxQ's usually stay good for 18+ hours with the new ice blocks we use.....ALL our coolers are validated for 10 hours - regardless of how much longer they qualify for.

Confusing?  Sorry - I tend to get carried away some times! 

I would be happy to share our validation plan for this cooler.  Please send me a private message with your email.

Edited July 25, 20241 yr by Cliff
Removed recipient email to prevent spam.

MaxQ also provides validation plans on their website for each cooler type.

The latest MTP cooler is much more hassle then the previous version.  I have 1 of the new ones and no one chooses to use it over the older one.  Change my mind!

I use water filled therapeutic phlebotomy bags as we do not expire out product (we are a smaller facility and send RBCs back to our supplier)  I place a thermometer in the cooler and label all of the units with our hemotemp stickers.  I check the units every hour for 4 hours.  I have determined that 3 of our frozen packs last about 5 hours before the blood hemotemp stickers turn too warm.  So we use 4 hours as our time frame.  We hardly use coolers though.  Maybe every once in a while we will send a unit with a helicopter.