Supporting your practice: Cold chain management in the outreach and mobile setting

Vaccines are temperature-sensitive biological products that, to ensure potency, must be stored between 2 degreesC and 8 degreesC from the time of manufacture to the point of administration. Exposure to temperatures above this range may result in reduction of shelf-life, while exposure to freezing temperatures is likely to cause irreversible loss of vaccine potency. Ensuring vaccines and temperature sensitive medicines are not exposed to temperatures outside 2-8 degreesC is known as 'cold chain management'. Pharmacists have a professional responsibility to administer efficacious and immunogenic vaccines. Breaches in the vaccine cold chain may result in the administration of vaccines that cannot elicit an immune response and therefore may leave the individual and community at risk of vaccine-preventable diseases.