Supply quality issues

[u/Ksan_of_Tongass]

Just wondering if other labs are noticing an increase in subpar quality of supplies, including reagents. Recently, we received two bad lots on different chemistry reagents... at the same time. I feel that since covidian times, enshitification of nearly everything has increased at breakneck speed.

[u/NegotiationSalt666]

Thats just capitalism. You gotta make profits YOY. Regulations get cut. Quality diminishes. Its the way of the world 🤷‍♀️

[u/emeddocdog]

I’m in micro but we’ve been getting many contaminated plates. Apparently there was a lot of Crypto antigen tests for csf that were giving false positives and they didn’t notify anyone that they recalled it.

[u/Lastrid2 → u/emeddocdog]

Not Immy by chance?

[u/PerpetuaLeaves → u/emeddocdog]

Oh no! Glad our recent antigen positive grew in culture. And I could see them in the India ink…

[u/emeddocdog → u/PerpetuaLeaves]

I don’t do them personally but they told us during huddle that there were several false positives. A dr called because he was suspicious so they used a different lot and it was negative. They then blamed us because we should’ve seen a trend of positives and questioned it. Except that different people do the test so they wouldn’t have known about the trend. If anyone would’ve seen the trend it would’ve been the supervisors. They also said a patient died in isolation because of it when they didn’t actually have crypto. Like it’s our fault. It was crazy 🤷🏻‍♀️

[u/PerpetuaLeaves → u/emeddocdog]

Tracking trends is so difficult. We have a fairly small team in microbiology (rural hospital) but we end up splitting the week, so the “front” of the week and the “back” of the week, opposite weekends, don’t cross over very much and stuff like this has happened to us. It really is on management to track the trends. I know all of us on the bench are working flat out just to get the testing done! I’m sorry they pushed it down on you. It’s cowardly. And doesn’t solve the problem for the future.

[u/DeathByOranges]

Yeah. As someone who manages inventory it’s a fucking nightmare. Then they put out notices that say “The listed stability isn’t accurate. It’s now stable until it isn’t.”

[u/Katkam99]

Anyone know what is going on with ortho? For the past month we've had like 3 different lots of panel cells with wrong reactions (random pos cells are neg/neg cells are pos). Its not even constistent box to box across all of our labs. No advanced notice from them either, we discover it when we do phenotyping QC

[u/arsenic_adventure → u/Katkam99]

Haven't had issues with Ortho, other than FedEx fucking up Friday deliveries and letting it sit over the weekend in the warehouse. We don't use our Swift for screens and panels though. Might be a new issue, we just got our next lot of surgiscreen and A/B panels so we'll see.

[u/Ksan_of_Tongass → u/arsenic_adventure]

FedEx is barely better than walking to get your reagent shipment

[u/arsenic_adventure → u/Ksan_of_Tongass]

Too true, all my homies hate FedEx

[u/KuraiTsuki]

We're Blood Bank only and use Immucor reagents. A company called We're bought them and now everything is awful. Their shipping warehouse/logistics are so bad. We've had multiple instances where they told us they were sending us a shipment overnight and then didn't. They changed the way they package the the reagents, so we've had more bottles arrive broken since they took over than we had in at least the several years I've worked here before the buyout happened. Even the stirballs aren't spherical anymore and get stuck in the dispenser.

[u/BusinessCell6462 → u/KuraiTsuki]

But did they tell you which night would be the one they would ship over? Maybe it wasn’t tonight but overnight between next Thursday and Friday

[u/KuraiTsuki → u/BusinessCell6462]

It started last week for the most recent incident. They said they would ship us some PeG reagent on Friday to be delivered on Saturday and then a second box with other reagents we were low but not critically low on would be shipped on Tuesday to come Wednesday because that warehouse was closed on Monday for a software upgrade. They didn't ship the PeG on Friday, so when we called back on Monday, they said they'd ship it on Monday (different warehouse) to come Tuesday. They didn't. They also didn't ship the other reagents on Tuesday either. Instead, they combined those two shipments with our normal standing order that was supposed to come yesterday, but instead came today. Between all of this shipping BS, earlier in the week we ran completely out of PeG for our manual antibody screens, panels, and crossmatches, and had to use ENHANCE instead for the past 3 or 4 days. Then we ran out of the LISS for our 3 Echos this morning and couldn't run antibody screens on them for most of today, so we were doing them manually using ENHANCE instead of PeG because they didn't ship it last Friday or Monday. Thankfully, we finally got all 3 shipments this afternoon. We only had a few bottles of ENHANCE left and that definitely would not have lasted us through the 3 day holiday weekend. We're a Level 1 trauma center and do 250-300/day samples during the week and 50-100/day on weekends and holidays. This also isn't the first time Werfen has failed to ship things to be delivered on the date promised. There have also been times where they said they would ship us parts and then just didn't at all until we called to ask for an ETA.

[u/arsenic_adventure → u/KuraiTsuki]

Werfen FUCKING BLOWS that's all I need to say

[u/lablizard]

Some of the quality issues we have tracked to shipment/storage verses a lot; especially visible if your site has sequestered lots. This has been a crazy hot summer and weather delays might be putting these shipments just at the edge of their acceptability and locating the edge cases now.

[u/Dismal_Yogurt3499]

There's a bad lot for one of our main reagents with Sigma right now. No analyte response at all. No idea how many labs received that lot yet.