When a Shipment Arrives Compromised

Part of Clinical Laboratory (LAB) Training: Shipping and the Cold Chain.

About 2 minutes. Free, in your language, no account needed.

Receiving is also a cold chain responsibility

You will be on the receiving end as well as the sending end. The same judgment applies in reverse.

Open and assess immediately

A shipment left on a bench while you finish something else is a shipment whose condition you can no longer state.

Record the arrival time, the condition of the box, whether coolant remains, and the logger reading.

Remaining dry ice is evidence

An empty shipper tells you the coolant ran out at some point. It does not tell you when, and the logger does.

Note roughly how much remains before it sublimates further. It is information that will be gone in an hour.

Read the logger before anything else

Download or read the trace immediately. It shows the whole journey, not just the end.

A shipment that arrived cold may still have spent six hours warm in transit. Arrival temperature alone hides that completely.

Do not put compromised samples into general storage

Quarantine them, physically and in the record, until the sponsor decides.

Filing them into the normal freezer inventory means somebody will use them without knowing there was a question.

Report to both ends

The sending laboratory needs to know so they can correct the cause. The sponsor needs to know so they can assess the data.

Telling only one leaves either the cause unfixed or the data unassessed.

Write it as an observation

"Shipper arrived with no visible dry ice remaining; logger shows minus seventy or below for eighteen hours, then rising to minus twelve for the final nine hours." That is usable.

"Shipment arrived warm" is not, because it does not let anyone judge the exposure.

The samples may well be fine

Many compromised shipments are released after assessment. Reporting promptly is what makes that assessment possible.