subject: Preparing And Shipping Medical Material In Hot Weather [print this page] If you are in the medical field or the pharmaceutical field you will find times when you have to ship medical material in hot weather. Shipping in hot weather has its own set of problems. If the medical material gets too hot the materials will be ruined. Medical material is very important merchandise and must be treated with the utmost of care.
The first thing you can do to protect your precious cargo is to make sure it is prepared and packaged properly. This usually calls for the use of temperature controlled containers. Next you will need to find a trucking service that is climate controlled. You will want to make sure the trucks at the trucking service are well maintained. It would do no one any good if the refrigeration unit went out on the hottest day of the year. Make sure the handlers know how to handle medical material or materials that are climate controlled. If your shipment arrives at its destination just to sit outside in the heat is doing no one any good either. The shipment can go bad while sitting outside. Pick a service that will see the product to the next climate controlled area.
If your medical material is going cross country by plane, the service you choose should see to it that they are prompt about moving the materials from the truck to the climate controlled area of the plane. Remember your packages will see some heat from the truck to the plane. It is imperative that they are packaged in temperature sensitive packing to keep them cool while out of the climate controlled areas. If you chose a good service they will keep your medical material cool whenever possible. On hot days it will not take long for medical material to get warm and be useless.
When looking for good services in your area, there are things you can check with the different available services. Find out how long they have handled climate controlled materials, find out how well they maintain their delivery trucks, and find out if they know how to handle an emergency such as a cooling failure. A good delivery service will have plans implemented in case of a cooling failure. Waiting on another truck to arrive could be too late. However, driving to the nearest store that sells ice, in order to ice down the medical materials while waiting on a truck, is at least a plan.
