Supply Chain Strategic Focus Area Advance the Market Availability of Solar Energy Harvest Control-Equipped Cold Chain Equipment Date of notice: April 1, 2019   Summary: Manufacturers of World Health Organization (WHO) Performance, Quality and Safety (PQS) prequalified solar direct drive (SDD) appliances that can be coupled with a market-ready energy harvest control (EHC) op...

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the WHO Performance, Quality and Safety (PQS) Secretariat, we are delighted to invite your response to our survey on the use of refrigerated vehicles in immunization programmes.

Refrigerated vehicles are crucial in the delivery of life-saving vaccines. Programmes that depend on one or a small number of refrigerated vehicles may be seriously impeded if a vehicle breaks down or is unable to maintain the temperature range that is required for t...

Dear Colleagues, You are invited to contribute to a new discussion on 'When should Ministries of Health use refrigerated vehicle to deliver vaccines?'. Discussion co-moderated by James Cheyne and John Lloyd: There are at least four good reasons for using refrigerated vehicles to replace the classic pickup trucks loaded with cold boxes: The number of vaccines used in national immunization programmes has roughly doubled over the past 20 years and the number of new...

Good morning, If your immunization programme uses a refrigerated vehicle WHO needs your insights and experience to help guide and improve the standards of these vehicles. Take this opportunity to share your expertise with the community and contribute to global improvements.  Please post your answers to TechNet-21 to three questions below: Excluding routine servicing, has the vehicle needed to be repaired over the past three years? Inside the refrigerated body have you ...

WHO PQS is conducting a survey to learn from users of Remote Temperature Monitoring Devices (RTMDs) and inform the future of vaccine cold chain monitoring. Have you ever… Received a text, email or notifications from an RTMD? Interacted with RTMD hardware in the field, including responding to alarms? Setup RTMD hardware and/or software? Interacted with an online RTMD web portal? Conducted repairs or service on RTMDs? If so, we want YOU to help inform the future ...

Le Secrétariat de l’OMS, par le biais de ses services chargés des normes de Performance, Qualité et Sécurité (PQS), mène une enquête pour recueillir des informations sur les systèmes DCTD pour mieux comprendre les besoins programmatiques des utilisateurs, gestionnaires et administrateurs de systèmes. Ces informations aideront à éclairer la mise au point des futurs produits et normes par le biais des profils de produits cibles (PPC) liés aux normes PQS. Les normes PQS de l’OMS utilisen...

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the WHO Performance, Quality and Safety (PQS) Secretariat, we are delighted to invite your response to our survey on the use of refrigerated vehicles in immunization programmes.

Refrigerated vehicles are crucial in the delivery of life-saving vaccines. Programmes that depend on one or a small number of refrigerated vehicles may be seriously impeded if a vehicle breaks down or is unable to maintain the temperature range that is required f...

Dear TechNet Community, On Tuesday 10th July 2018, the WHO Performance, Quality and Safety (PQS) Working Group conducted its first face-to-face technical consultation with manufacturers of PQS prequalified immunization products and devices from the E003 (Refrigerators and freezers) and E006 (Temperature Monitoring Devices) equipment categories - some of you may also have followed the event in real time via the TechNet-21 Twitter account. Thirty industry representatives took pa...

... and all you have to do is follow the TechNet-21 Twitter account (or copy paste: https://twitter.com/TechNet21Mod in your internet browser) So far Denise's tweets have gained 779 impressions (tweets seen), that's awesome, and it's only the beginning. Don't miss out on pictures and discussion's insights!      ...

Dear TechNet-21 Colleagues, WHO PQS will be engaging with a selected group of PQS product manufacturers on Tuesday, July 10th to discuss and agree on a path forward for some significant proposed changes to immunization cold chain equipment standards. Although this is a closed event, the PQS Team and TechNet-21 are partnering to bring you exclusive insights from the meeting and I will be guest tweeting from the TechNet-21 Twitter account, sharing highlights and pictures from this first...

One of the beneficial features of SDD refrigerators is its relative simplicity. Electrically two wires from the solar array are directly connected to the compressor. This simplicity minimizes problems in the field and simplifies repairs. Energy harvesting technology introduces a great deal of electronic complexity and the complexity increases as a larger percent of the available energy is harvested. In the US the primary mode of failure of new refrigerators is the electronic circuitry. In the...

Three years after the freeze-free concept was reported at the September 2014 meeting of the WHO PQS Committee, the current expectation of availability remains ‘sometime next year’ and it appears that no product has passed the pre-qualification (E004/VC02-VP.1) testing yet. The current status of this product was presented at the last Technet Conference by WHO/PQS. During the resulting discussion, I noted five issues that seem to require attention: The outside dimensions and weig...

Dear Technet members, I would like to share my thoughts on the temperature monitoring devices and thermostal for vaccine refrigeration system. In the early days of EPI, temperature of the refrigerator was measured and displayed by a simple analogue thermometer which was either a bi-metal or stem type alcohol thermometer.  Twice daily the health worker records these temperature on the temperature monitoring sheet and posted on the door of the fridge.  Filled temperature records...

Dear Technet21 Members, We are pleased to invite you to take part in our new survey about the WHO Performance, Quality and Safety (PQS) website. We want to make sure the website is functioning optimally for all its users, and so we are keen to learn more about why and how you use the PQS website, and what your personal experience has been. Answering the survey questions will take around 7-10 minutes of your time. The survey will remain open until the 30th of September and shor...

I’ve been reading with great interest the most recent issue of Vaccine, which is dedicated to “Building Next-Generation Immunization Supply Chains”. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0264410X/35/17 I particularly enjoyed the following article but was surprised to read that the authors identified a discrepancy between WHO PQS and Gavi Cold Chain Equipment Optimization Platform guidance relating...

Dear friends, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is very pleased to present the Cold Chain Equipment ‘Technology Guide’, to support the appropriate selection of modern, efficient and reliable technologies. Download the guide here.
Identifying the most appropriate equipment choices for each health facility is key to help ensure more facilities have adequate cold chain capacity, and that more ...

Outil de calcul du Coût Total de Possession d’équipements de la chaîne du froid
L’outil de calcul du Coût Total de Possession (CTP) d’équipements de la chaîne du froid a été développé afin d’assister les utilisateurs dans leur compréhension du coût d’achat et de maintenance des équipements de la chaîne du froid. L’outil peut être personnalisé pays par pays et calcule les dépenses en capital et en coûts d’opération pour les équipements préqualifié par le département Qualité ...

Choices, choices, choices – they are both the bane and blessing of our times. As immunization managers, we now have a wide array of PQS-prequalified cold chain equipment to choose from, but how do we make the right choices and get the best value for our bucks? The TechNet Product Reviews area helps you do just that, with users in the field, who are constantly ‘testing’ the product, giving you feedback about the equipment they are using be it refrigerators, thermometers or vaccine carriers. Take,...

The percent difference between the gross refrigerator (ILRs and SDDs) volumes quoted in the PQS Catalogue and the net vaccine storage volume varies from 29.6% to 88.6 %. This is a wide variation for front opening fridges, due to space for air-circulation. Increasingly, new models of ILR and SDD are emerging with cooled internal walls and cooled ceilings. Some of these models maintain a satisfactory internal temperature distribution whether they are packed according to the test procedu...

Newly-prequalified cold chain equipment is regularly added to the PQS Catalogue. To keep up-to-date with changes to the PQS Catalogue, you can now follow the PQS updates feed on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/pqs_updates

In addition to listing newly-prequalified equipment, the feed also highlights new and updated target product profiles (TPP), as well as PQS news and issues.

The PQS Catalogue ...

Next month, TechNet launches a new area for members to review cold chain equipment. The 'Reviews' area will list all PQS-prequalified devices and equipment, arranged into the following PQS categories: Cold rooms and freezer rooms (E001) Refrigerators and freezers (E003) Insulated containers and accessories (E004, E005) Temperature monitoring devices (E006) Injection devices for immunization (E008) Waste management equipment (E010) Therap...

The data given for solar-powered refrigerators in the PQS sheets is not given consistently enough so that comparisons of various models can be made. The data needed for a fair comparison most often is energy consumption at 32 deg C without ice making, energy use with ice making and quantity of ice made. It would also be useful to know the number of days of autonomy time for direct-drive refrigerators. Looking at the PQS sheets it is not always clear how to obtain total energy consumption when...

Dear all, The PQS team is glad to announce that you now have access to the new PQS webpage generated by our database at: http://apps.who.int/immunization_standards/vaccine_quality/pqs_catalogue/index.aspx The new PQS home page gives you easy access to prequalified devices, vaccines and laboratories. It also contains various links related to vaccines and e...

PQS Data I was recently trying to compare PQS data for direct drive refrigerators. Data for two parameters of prime importance are not always given: - Solar radiation reference period - Power consumption: Stable Running Data is also usually given for 43 deg C and sometimes for 32 deg C. Data at 32 deg C is most useful because it is more typical of average daily temperatures in developing countries. I don’t think there is tropical location where 24-hour average temperatures are near 43...