Gem 5000 cartridge issues

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Good morning. We have had 3 bad gem cartridges within a one week period and I was wondering if anyone else was having any issues. 2 of them leaked PCS solution in their original packaging and one was an out of the box pO2 failure which we've had before. Just a little concerned since we only have 2 instruments and this one is in our Cath Lab.

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I have 18 GEMs at my facility and have had a couple of paks kick off for similar reasons over this past weekend as well. I assign blame for PCS solution errors on the shipping process, and I had one pO2 failure and then another one that didn't even give me an error, just kicked off which Werfen is looking into. We did have a "bad" batch of cartridges at one point over the summer, and that may be the case here as well. In my experience, with zero scientific evidence to back it up, is that they do go in streaks where there will be a couple of issues and then all is well for a while. But no, I would not be alarmed unless it was consistently the same issue, like lactate going out on multiple paks which could indicate something is wrong with the device. 

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Jessica Lang
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