Medical-grade cold storage is designed to provide precision temperature control to keep life-saving drugs, critical diagnostic reagents, and priceless patient samples viable to provide care for patients who need it.
Like other medical tools of the trade, refrigerators must be cared for and maintained in order to ensure performance and continued reliability. To get the best results from your medical-grade refrigerators and freezers, you’ll need to create a plan, assign responsibility, and perform several tasks.
In this blog we’ll discuss the who, when, and what of maintaining your medical refrigerators.
Who Should Perform Preventative Maintenance?
Preventative maintenance may be performed by operators, biomedical teams, or third-party service providers.
Preventative maintenance may be assigned to the equipment operators in the department to conduct on a regular basis. However, staff workloads are often heavy and many times preventative maintenance can be overlooked or forgotten until it's too late.
Many facilities place the responsibility for preventative maintenance on the biomedical team. This team is responsible for conducting repairs should a unit fail and has a technical understanding of the equipment that can allow them to identify potential issues while conducting the preventative maintenance process. Unfortunately, biomedical teams must often prioritize equipment repairs rather than conducting preventative maintenance.
The third option is to have a third-party service provider perform regular preventative maintenance on your medical-grade equipment. Highly trained technicians conduct the inspections and cleaning required in a PM while reducing the workload on internal teams. Annual service plans as well as customized service partnerships may be offered, which provide additional support by managing and scheduling regular preventative maintenance for equipment. The perceived downside of this arrangement is the cost of a service plan.
Helmer Scientific offers preventative maintenance plans as well as customized service plans, which helps keep equipment performing optimally, provides operational efficiency and convenience, and helps decrease disruptions due to product failure.
When Should Preventative Maintenance Be Performed?
Preventative maintenance should be performed annually at a minimum, though many health systems find value in conducting them 2-4 times per year.
The more frequently your equipment is checked, the more likely any issues will be discovered before repairs become necessary or unit performance decreases.
Based on data collected by the Helmer Scientific service organization, as many as 25 percent of equipment failures could be prevented with proper preventative maintenance.
4 Preventative Maintenance Tasks that Should Be Performed
There are many tasks that should be completed when performing preventative maintenance. Here are four preventative maintenance tasks that shouldn't be skipped.
Inspect all door gaskets for separation, cracks, and tears.
The door gasket seals the door when closed, keeping the room temperature air out and the cold air in. If there is any separation, tearing, or cracking in the gasket, warm air will leak into the cabinet, causing strain on the compressor, reducing the service life of the equipment, and potentially causing temperature excursions.
Simply checking the door seals regularly and replacing them if a breach is found can reduce the risk of a much more costly repair from overworking the compressor.
Inspect all probe bottle fluid levels and fill as needed.
One of the most common causes of false temperature excursion alarms is lack of fluid in the probe bottle. The fluid in the probe bottle is designed to mimic liquids stored inside of the refrigerator so the cabinet temperature reflects the temperature of the stored products, not the air temperature.
Over time, fluid can spill, leak, or evaporate. Once the fluid is gone or reaches critically low levels, the probe will be reading the air temperature instead of the fluid temperature, which can cause false temperature excursion alarms.
Some manufacturers, including Helmer, provide alternatives to traditional probe bottles that eliminate the need to check and refill probe bottles. Many of these solutions can be retroactively installed if probe bottle maintenance becomes too taxing for a team.
Inspect and clean condenser grill.
The condenser grill, which is usually on the back or bottom of the unit, is designed to release heat produced by the compressor during operations and vent it away from the refrigerator cabinet. Because the airflow through the condenser grill is constant, dust and other particulates may accumulate.
If not properly cleaned, dust accumulation can reduce the refrigerator’s ability to release heat, putting additional strain on the cooling system that can reduce the functionality and lifespan of your equipment.
Check inside the cabinet FOR airflow obstructions.
As with the condenser grill, airflow inside the cabinet is critical for precise temperature control and uniformity. Most medical-grade refrigerators use forced-air refrigeration to maintain precise temperature uniformity throughout the cabinet, keeping product in all locations at a similar temperature.
The forced-air refrigeration process involves the use of fans inside the cabinet to circulate cold air. As product is placed in the refrigerator cabinet for storage, it is critical to ensure the fans are not obstructed.
When product is stacked in front of the fans or the cabinet is overstocked with product, circulation is reduced and can cause hot and cold spots throughout the cabinet, exposing product to potential temperature excursions.
Regularly checking material stored within the cabinet to ensure all circulating fans and vents are unobstructed can help maintain temperature uniformity, protecting drugs, vaccines, reagents, blood products, and patient samples.
OTHER BLOGS YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN...
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- Why Service Matters in Healthcare: Part 1
- Why Service Matters in Healthcare: Part 2
- Regular Preventative Maintenance Supports Regulatory Compliance
What is the Best Resource for Information on Preventative Maintenance?
These recommendations are just a few of the preventative maintenance measures that should be conducted on a regular basis. One of the best sources of preventative maintenance information is the operator’s manual for your piece of equipment. Manufacturers typically provide a list of tasks to perform along with a schedule and instructions on how to perform them.
If your staff or biomedical teams lack bandwidth to conduct regular preventative maintenance, Helmer offers annual preventative maintenance plans and customized service partnerships. These plans offer quarterly, semiannual, or annual preventative maintenance that include a 20-point inspection and cleaning, alarm testing, equipment calibration, and more.
Helmer TrueBlue™ Preventative Maintenance decreases disruptions due to product failure, is non-disruptive and does not require removing equipment from service. It also helps with compliance management and documentation. To learn more about Helmer annual preventative maintenance plans or customized service partnerships, reach out to your Helmer representative or submit a request on our website.
