The Practice requires an efficient and reliable solution to monitoring the medical stock that is administered to their patients.Tinytag Talk 2 Medical data loggers provide that solution in three clinical fridges where vaccines are held.

Craig y Don is a busy NHS Medical Practice in North Wales. Serving Llandudno and the surrounding area, the Practice has over 11,000 registered patients and a dedicated team of Doctors, Nurses and Healthcare Assistants providing their care. With every day a busy one, the Practice requires an efficient and reliable solution to monitoring the medical stock that is administered to their patients.

Tinytag Talk 2 Medical data loggers provide that solution in three clinical fridges where vaccines are held. Keeping track of the storage temperatures of vaccines is vital to ensuring their efficacy. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that vaccines should be stored at between +2°C and +8°C in order for them to remain usable. Storage conditions in all stages of the vaccine supply chain must be accounted for, and it is the responsibility of staff at the Practice to ensure that vaccines are kept at the correct temperature before they are administered to patients.

Data from the loggers is offloaded weekly to validate the temperature of the fridges. Records are then analysed, printed and saved electronically. The staff at the Medical Practice also complete daily checks on the vaccine fridges, which have displays on the outside, showing the internal temperature. A member of staff records this temperature manually three times a day. The weekly data from the Tinytags is cross-referenced with the manual records to verify that temperatures have stayed within range. A flashing red alarm indicator can be programmed to indicate if temperatures have deviated from a pre-defined range.

If the data from the loggers shows that there has been a temperature excursion, appropriate action is taken by senior staff to rectify the situation. When a breach of temperature did occur at the practice after the door of one of the clinical fridges was left open over a weekend, data from the weekly offload of the Tinytag enabled the staff to pinpoint the exact timescale of the temperature breach, as well as what levels the temperatures reached during this time.The data also allowed the Senior Nurse to check which of the vaccines had become unusable due to the temperature levels, and destroy the affected vaccines accordingly. Thanks to the data logger, the staff managed to save some of the vaccines, as they could identify which vaccines were not affected and remained stable.

Gillian Caine, Deputy Practice Manager at Craig y Don Medical Practice, is pleased with how Tinytags have aided the Practice in delivering efficient quality of care to their patients. "The data loggers are a great asset to our organisation," she comments. "They are easy to use, quick to download, print off the information and relaunch, and are useful to check that the clinical fridges are being used correctly."

Tinytag Talk 2 Medical data loggers are specially designed for use in vaccine fridges. Housed in a 35mm film canister, the loggers can be placed directly alongside vaccines to yield accurate measurements of conditions which the vaccines experience, a cost-effective measure that has helped Craig y Don Medical Practice to follow best practice in vaccine management.