IACUC Ongoing Training
1. What is a pink card?
A. A cage side rodent medical record to document experimental procedures.
B. A cool card to take notes on if you want.
2. What minimum information needs to be kept on a pink card?
A. The top of the pink card (PI name, protocol number, CCM cage card number, room number, and record number).
B. For surgical procedures, the surgery type, analgesic information, and post operative care. For pre and post operative analgesics, inclusive of drug name, dose, route, date, and time of administration.
C. Wound Clip/Suture Removal (if applicable)
D. General description of an experimentally induced health condition or disease model. If a surgery, non-surgical procedure, or a genetical model causes a health condition a brief description of the model must be included on the pink card.
E. Where detailed clinical notations and monitoring are kept if not kept in the research records.
F. All of the above.
3. How long must pink cards and clinical care notes be kept?
A. At the cage level, a pink card must be kept for the life of the cage
B. Once a cage is removed from study, the laboratory must retain their records for at least 3 years and made available upon request of the IACUC of veterinarian.
C. Both A and B.
1. What is a pink card?
A. A cage side rodent medical record to document experimental procedures.
B. A cool card to take notes on if you want.
Learner Feedback: The correct answer is A. A pink card is nickname for the Investigator Rodent Medical record described in the Policy on Medical Records for Rodents. A pink card must be applied to a cage either when an animal has undergone surgery or when a health condition is experimentally induced. The pink card must be applied to the cage at the time of surgery, at the time an experimentally health condition is induced, or at the time a health condition is expected in the case of genetically modified animals. B is incorrect because the pink card is required in the above circumstances.
2. What minimum information needs to be kept on a pink card?
A. The top of the pink card (PI name, protocol number, CCM cage card number, room number, and record number).
B. For surgical procedures, the surgery type, analgesic information, and post operative care. For pre and post operative analgesics, inclusive of drug name, dose, route, date, and time of administration.
C. Wound Clip/Suture Removal (if applicable)
D. General description of an experimentally induced health condition or disease model. If a surgery, non-surgical procedure, or a genetical model causes a health condition a brief description of the model must be included on the pink card.
E. Where detailed clinical notations and monitoring are kept if not kept in the research records.
F. All of the above.
Learner Feedback:
The correct answer is F, all the above! A common omission on pink cards is the top portion of the card with the PI’s name, protocol, and CCM cage card number. It is very important to ensure the top part of the card is filled out as a way to ensure the cage is assigned to the correct protocol and to ensure that the pink card is able to be placed on the correct cage should the pink card get separated or mixed up.
For analgesics, a common omission is the time and route of the analgesic administration, this is important to ensure continuous coverage of analgesics post-surgery.
It is important to indicate how the animal looks once the analgesic regimen for the procedure is complete to ensure the animals are no longer experiencing pain. If they are, please reach out to the CCM Veterinary team!
For experimentally induced health conditions, it is important to ensure a brief description of the model is present such as animals are expected to experience neurological symptoms due to their genotype or procedure performed or animals are had tumor induced and they are expected to grow.
Detailed clinical care notations can be continued on the pink card or kept in lab notes.
IMPORTANT: please review your protocol and procedures to see if your particular experiments require documentation on a pink card or other specific documentation requirement.
3. How long must pink cards and clinical care notes be kept?
A. At the cage level, a pink card must be kept for the life of the cage
B. Once a cage is removed from study, the laboratory must retain their records for at least 3 years and made available upon request of the IACUC of veterinarian.
C. Both A and B.
Learner Feedback: The correct answer is C, both A and B. Pink cards must stay with the cage for the life of that cage. Pink cards and separate clinical care notations documents must be maintained by the laboratory for 3 years and be made available to the IACUC or veterinarian on request. TIP: You may make scans of the pink cards and store them digitally at the end of the study if desired.
The Post Approval Monitoring team is happy to assist laboratories with streamlining their cage side documentation including providing veterinary medical abbreviations, creating surgical or experimentally induced health condition Avery labels, and/or create other documentation that can be used.