Chemical inventory for hospitals and pathology

Sites and locations form a tree. For a hospital that usually means a building, then a department, then a room, store, cabinet or shelf. A row belongs to a location, so a histology manager can work in their own view while the safety team sees the site as a whole. Saved views such as "Awaiting disposal" or "Flammables store" let each department keep what it cares about one click away.

Roles match how hospitals divide work. A technician edits stock. A viewer can read without editing, which suits a health and safety lead. An approver signs off requests above a value you set. A finance user sees invoices and the plan.

Histology and cytology stock moves in a steady cycle: formalin in, specimens processed, used formalin out; xylene and alcohols used on the processor and stainer, then replaced. The register records containers, with an inline quantity adjustment and a reason, so a bench manager can see what is open. Waste awaiting collection stays on the record, and an alert fires when it has been waiting for over 60 days.

Staining reagents and specialist chemicals such as DAB, glutaraldehyde, ethidium bromide and osmium tetroxide link to hazard data in the same way as anything else. Items with a short working life benefit most from opened dates and review dates. Our pathology and histology page covers the waste side.

The Hospital plan adds HTM 07-01 waste streams to disposal requests. NHS England's Health Technical Memorandum 07-01 sets out colour coding for healthcare waste, and it is explicit that waste chemicals should not go into clinical, offensive or municipal streams, and that in England and Wales such mixing is prohibited.

So a request from a hospital can carry itemised chemicals alongside general laboratory or clinical waste, entered by stream with chapter 18 EWC codes and an estimated weight or container count. Our HTM 07-01 guide explains where laboratory chemical waste fits. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own colour-coding systems, so the labels need checking against local policy there.

Departmental collections let you request a collection for a single department while keeping the site record intact. Each collection has a timeline: submitted, pricing, quoted, accepted, scheduled, collected, documents received, completed. A department can follow its own job without phoning the waste officer, and the waste officer can see them all.

Box 4 arranges collection through registered hazardous waste carriers and handles the quote, paperwork and invoice. Hospital staff see one price. The note shows the carrier and consignee at the document stage, as the law requires. A pre-filled note is generated on acceptance, and the signed copy goes into the archive.

In England, producers and holders are told to keep a register of consignment notes and related documents for three years at the premises that produced or stored the waste. For an estates or waste team managing several departments, having those notes attached to the collections they belong to is much easier than a set of folders. Notes in the archive cannot be deleted by a user in your organisation, only archived. Our consignment note guide covers this.

HSE requires employers with five or more employees to record the significant findings of their COSHH assessment and keep that record accessible. The hazardous substances register report gives you the department's or site's list of what is held, with hazard information. Alerts flag incompatible storage, peroxide formers past their threshold and expiring stock.

The assistant can draft register entries and storage risk notes, marked as drafts for the competent person to sign. A draft cannot know that a stainer's extraction was serviced last month. That is for the competent person to add.

Sign-in is through Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 on this plan, in addition to email and password with optional TOTP. Staff leaving a department are then handled through your existing account process. Every register change writes an immutable audit entry, and the audit export lets a department supply that record to its governance team. A scheduled monthly export of the register by email is also included.

It does not hold controlled drugs records or handle radioactive sources. Those are outside the self-serve route. It is not a pharmacy stock system or a laboratory information management system. It does not store suppliers' safety data sheets.

NHS buyers should also read our security page carefully. We hold no certifications, we have not completed the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit, and backups are held in Germany. If those points rule us out today, we would rather you knew that now.

The Hospital plan is £349 a month or £3,490 a year for one hospital site or private lab, invoiced and paid by BACS. Multi-site trusts and groups are quoted on Enterprise. See pricing.