My partner takes various medicines which have storage requirements such as "between 15 and 30C", "less than 25C" and so on.
Pharmacists are be required to have storage facilities capable of a range 8 to 22C.
In a domestic context, it is difficult to find a suitable location in the warmer weather. Nowhere in our house is cool enough. Standard fridges are too cold. Travel cool boxes (and similar) that I have seen do not have proper thermostats. Wine coolers (the best so far!) are overpriced and too large.
Any ideas how I could cobble together something that achieves:
Reliability Reasonably accurate, selectable temperature (8 to 22C would be suitable). Reasonable efficiency Small volume (only a few packets of pills, etc.) Quiet Low cost!
Make a small box out of it, stick the pills inside and bung it in the fridge. Some experimentation with a thermometer may be required to work out the amount of insulation required, and the best place in the fridge.
Might be easier to add a proper thermostat to one of those travel coolboxes, if they are satisfactory in other respects. A temp probe and digital control module with high/low alarm outputs, through a relay, should switch the coolbox on and off adequately. Maplin used to do such, probably available from RS etc.
Cheapest, if you have the space, would probably be a standard fridge (second hand) with the thermostat fuggled to the appropriate temp range, or replaced with aforesaid digital control module. Plenty of other uses in this weather for a 10C fridge for food storage that doesn't need refridgeration but would benefit from coolth.
|Rod wrote: | |> I have a little bit of spare 50mm Kingspan... | |Make a small box out of it, stick the pills inside and bung it in the |fridge. Some experimentation with a thermometer may be required to work |out the amount of insulation required, and the best place in the fridge.
Anything placed in a fridge, however well insulated, will eventually reach the temperature of the fridge, and so get outside the temperature range quoted.
Buy the smallest, cheapest electric coolbox you can find. Buy a suitable thermostat for it and connect it in line with the coolbox supply to a suitably rated 12V transformer.
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You could canibalise one from a powered coolbox. Or just use the box with a thermostat and a mains adaptor. Needn't be a big adaptor, either, if it's under-rated it'll just take longer to get down to the right temperature.
If you're /really/ clever you could arrange the thermostat to reverse the current, not just interrupt it, so it'd warm the box if ambient fell below target.
Is it *really* critical that they are kept at certain temperatures? Doctors and pharmacists must know that the average bod doesn't have the neccessaries at home to achieve precise temperature control so I'd have thought either in the fridge for medicines which need to be cold, or room temperature for those which don't, would be fine. Ask a pharmacist, I would.
No it's not. Those guidelines are for longer term storage. All the medications I take say the same sort of thing. I keep them out of sunlight but that's all, I'm still alive and one preparation is critical.
Almost certainly not. The instructions could probably say "Keep cool. Do not freeze." I expect the 8 degrees lower limit is specified to make sure they don't freeze.
"Mungo \"Two Sheds\" Toadfoot" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@pipex.net:
At least one is important. The Australian version has just been changed so that the max. temperature quoted provides a longer specific lifetime. Previously, the temperature was higher and the quoted life shorter. This medicine is well known to deteriorate at a temperature-dependent rate. Although it would still contain somewhere near the correct level, it has a very narrow therapeutic range. Partner's health changes significantly with a dose adjustment of less than 5%. And for various reasons it does tend to be prescribed in significant quantities (e.g. 3 months).
(There has been a bit if fuss over recent years as some manufacturers have been adding a little extra if the active ingredient so that, after 'average' storage, the patient would get the labelled amount. But this causes problems when a) patients get the new bacth before it has deteriorated and b) when different companies have different approaches. The FDA is not best pleased by this.)
Some of the others expressly state "Do not refrigerate" - quite possibly in order that they are in no danger of actually freezing.
Room temperature would be fine for many of them throughout the spring and autumn - but not when it gets above 30C! And a pharmacist could never reply that trangressing the manufacturers' guidelines would be acceptable.
But another medicien I got the other day was cold as handed over to me - it is mandatory for the pharmacy to keep it cooled.
I completely agree with you about the difficulty for the average bod - like me. I half hoped that someone would point out a suitable commercial device to save me the bother!
It seems impossible here to get anything prescribed for more than 28 days. Packs of 30 are cut down to 28. I've never received packs made up of 2s so it probably goes to waste. Bwurocracy gone mad!
Is that on free prescriptions? My wife was prescribed a course of treatment over 3 months that involved taking the drug for a weak at a time three times. this involved one visit to see the Dr, and two x two more to get repeat prescriptions, plus visits to chemists, and (probably more to the point) three prescription charges.
I thought the charge was for a course of treatment, but seems not. It probably comes out of the Dr's profits.
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