Investigating the integrity of blood components following an incomplete audit trail

[Sachin]

Dear Forum,

I have query regarding the components that remain in quarantine pending cold chain integrity checks. We use Blood Track to control and monitor audit trails for components when they leave the laboratory.

At times, clinical users make errors in that they forget to either move out a unit via the fridge kiosk before placing the unit in the designated location fridge. This of course creates an incomplete audit trail and as a result, the components generally tend to get wasted as we have no assurance as to when the unit was moved out of a fridge and place into another.

However, there are times where we have acquired confirmation from HCAs, Nurses, Clinicians and Porters as to when the unit was taken out of a fridge. Unfortunately we don't use these statements as evidence to support incomplete audit trails due to the risk of inaccuracy or trustworthiness of the statement.

There are times where we can make justified assumptions such as if the clinical user takes out another unit at the same time and moves it in to the same location as the compromised unit albeit correctly which could be used as evidence to support the non-comforming unit was taken at the same time.

I wanted to gain some insight as to how other labs investigate such matters to save units which would otherwise be needlessly wasted? I've attached an example audit trail for reference to this post.

Regards,

S