We have many refrigerators and freezers.

We have the luxury of having separate refrigerators and freezers for products that are in quarantine.

The one we have for frozen RBCs and plasma products is a small under the counter style - we have constant trouble with this unit.

If (when) this freezer fails and we discard it, we are considering storing our quarantine products in an existing freezer on a separate shelf.

I am not aware of any rule that requires us to have a separate refrigerator or freezer, am I correct in this?

Thanks

I have never read that it has to be a separate fridge or freezer. We have a box in our walkin fridge that we put quarantined units in with a sign that says "Quarantined".

Most regulations say that things need to be "segregated," so something doesn't get used inadvertantly. The segregated areas should be labeled, and everyone should know where and how to segregate things. There should no problems identified within your system.

There are many ways of segregating things in the same refrig/freezer. We place quarantined items in the same refrigerator as the current lots and units, but on their own labeled shelf (bottom) with a prominent tag/sticker on each item. Since we have only one freezer where everything is stored together, quarantined items are tagged and overwrapped, and stored as much away from the other stuff as we can manage.

We have separate referigerator for specimen and quaratine product. For frozen product, we do not have RBCs so some time if we need to quarantine a FFP or CRYO we label it and put it one of the self.

I think if you use same freezer with product segregated it should be fine unless somebody use that product inadverantly ....you will have to find other options. Most of the LIS would allow you to put unit in qurantine status so if the techs are using computer before relesing any product it would falg that unit is quarantine.