Five pharmacy branches across two atolls, receiving cold chain medicines through general cargo and with no record of what temperature anything had reached.
That is not an unusual situation and it is an uncomfortable one, because a vaccine or an insulin that has been warm looks exactly like one that has not. The pharmacist's only honest option was to trust it.
We set up a dedicated medicine run: pre chilled boxes, one logger per consignment, packed so nothing rests against the gel, and a two hour delivery window per branch rather than a day. The record is handed over with the goods and kept on file by both sides for a year.
In the first eight months, two consignments broke their range and both were caught and reported on the day. One was our fault, a box opened at a drop in the sun; the other was a supplier's load that was already warm when it reached the hub, and we refused to carry it onward.
The pharmacist's view was that finding two was worth more than being told about none.
