PRODUCT FOCUS INCUBATORS & REFRIDGERATION ICE SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE Richard McCann, Tomorrow’s Laboratories’ Guest Writer,meets with Queen Alexandra Hospital’s Colin Walker
as he investigates wireless temperature monitoring and data recording technology in hospital laboratories.
Colin Walker manages the Department of Clinical Microbiology at Queen Alexandra Hospital, Portsmouth. The department occupies a section of the hospital’s state-of-the-art Pathology Centre and provides a comprehensive range of diagnostic and clinical microbiology services, including bacteriology, mycology, parasitology, TB diagnostic service, diagnostic and screening serology and a range of molecular techniques for diagnosis of bacterial and viral infections. In addition, the department provides clinical advice on diagnosis, interpretation of results, infection
and outbreak control management and public health investigations, and education and training on all aspects of microbiology.
Colin explained“We’ve been using the IceSpy temperature monitoring system – from a British firm called The IMC Group – in Clinical Microbiology for more than 12 years.
“In September 2007, we had the opportunity to expand the system across Pathology when all the disciplines relocated to new purpose-built pathology premises at the hospital. So the expansion of IceSpy out of microbiology into blood
sciences and cellular pathology was based on the experiences of its value in microbiology during the previous five years.”
That experience-based decision took the department from manual record- keeping to an entirely automated, monitored and recorded system.
“Before we had automated wireless monitoring of temperature-related equipment, somebody would be tasked with going round and filling in the sheets for each piece of equipment to record the temperature.
“And, because we have a large number of pieces of equipment that lost us an hour out of each day.” continued Colin.
The wireless monitoring removed the need for busy staff to go around with a chart and manually record the equipment temperatures each day.
But there were other advantages: “We were manually recording temperatures only once a day whereas the wireless monitoring gave us the advantage of recording on an hourly basis. So we then had a ‘real time’ idea of how the equipment was performing, such that if there was a fault or the temperature fell outside the minimum and maximum
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