Any Lab Tech's out there with suggestions for storing our labs urine?

Any Lab Tech’s out there with suggestions for storing our labs urine?
How can my lab can adopt a better system for storing urine cups? Right now my lab runs anywhere from 20-50 UA’s a shift so we have potentially up to 150 cups of urine being stored in our walk-in-fridge a day. these are then held for 5 days to allow for Add-on-tests such as cultures, Urine chemistry’s ect.. Right now our storage system consists of 4 buckets with numbers 1-4 on them and the day of the week and date. The urine cups are thrown in the buckets often out of order and upside down. So that if we have to go search for urine to add more tests onto this can be a 30min to 1 hr ordeal if the urine isn’t right on the top of one of the buckets. I’m sure there has to be a better way to store this,perhaps racks that will hold the urine cups and let us scan them in with a bar code scanner and store them in the computer so we can easily look up a patients number and go find the rack? Any suggestions appreciated, upper lab management doesn’t seem concerned about this cuz they dont have to spend hours looking for pee at 3am on the night shift,lol. I would just like a good suggestion i could make.
Thanks, yeah the problem is the quanity of urines we do. I would like to store them like we do tubes of blood, by scanning them in a rack and storing by accession number or something.

Best answer:

we keep ours in a box with an accession label on the top of the cup with the date on it. we don’t have as many urines per day as you do but maybe if you were to have one box per shift (3 boxes for each day) with accession labels on the top with the patient’s name on it, that might help. while our urines aren’t in any real order, it’s not too hard to find them if they’re stacked right side up, side by side, and on top of each other. even if they are kinda messed up, as long as there’s a name on the lid it makes it much easier to find. if you don’t use a box but a shelf, you could separate the shelf with a divider for each shift’s urines. good luck.

Tags: labs, storing, suggestions, Tech's, there, urine

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