Hello:

 

I am a BB supervisor for a community hospital with a fairly quiet OR and I wanted to know what everyone thinks about monitoring freezers, fridges for the OR. How should this be delegated. Should we keep and monitor their equipment? What policy's are in place at your facilities?

 

Thank you.

 

 

What do they store in these refrigerators and freezers? Blood products? Tissues?

We made the OR resonsible for the daily monitoring of temps in the refrigerator they had there.  We did the required alarm checks.

If you have a fairly quiet Surgery Department, I would discourage blood refrigerators or freezers in the Surgery area.  (Personal opinion.)

 

Having said that, we do have blood refrigerators in Surgery and several other remote areas.  In Surgery & most of the other areas, they are responsible for the daily monitoring and documentation of temps of their blood refrigerators.  One area was consistantly laxed in doing this, so we have to call them every morning and ask them what the temp is (and we document it on a QC sheet.)  The Blood Bank Supervisor reviews and maintains the records of all of these daily temperature records.

 

However, we do the required alarm checks on all of the remote blood refrigerators.

What do they store in these refrigerators and freezers? Blood products? Tissues?

Fibrin sealant glue. 

I completely agree that It should be maintained daily by OR staff. I would like to try to convince them but somehow they seem to think that our responsibility is to monitor everyones freezers and the not-so-friendly OR Nurse Manager seems to agree with this. Any suggestions/ideas to help with this battle? Thank you for your feedback

Let them fail an inspection and remove the devices.  If you know an inspector/assessor try to arrange an off-year evaluation with one - ask them to focus on the remote storage areas.  That should provide enough info for administration to force the issue.  Of course, they could force YOU to do the daily monitoring, but your Medical Director should be able to say "NO" to that . . . if he/she has the chutzpah to do so.