There are several different conceptual ways of looking at problems (see Table 8.1). While much of this book is about being proactive, no system will be perfect and sometimes you will need to deal with a problem that has occurred or an issue that is affecting the lab, and you will have to be reactive. This Chapter is about what to do when things have gone wrong, including dealing with problems and troubleshooting them. Learning how to deal with these subjects is of interest to IVF lab people. αlpha, the international society of scientists in reproductive medicine (www.alphascientists.com), held an internet conference on this subject in 1998 (Elder and Elliott, 1998), and the αlpha workshop at the 11th World IVF Congress held in Sydney in May 1999, structured as a foundation workshop in reproductive biology, concluded with a session by Jacques Cohen on the practical application of this knowledge in the ART laboratory, with particular reference to troubleshooting.

Having to be reactive

Although we all believe (hope?) that we're doing everything right, that our success rates will be high (and remain high), and that things will continue to run smoothly, we all know that from time-to-time there will be problems. Sometimes problems are caused by factors outside our control, but sometimes they arise because we have not paid attention to detail, or have not bothered keeping up-to-date on some less interesting aspect of the field, or because someone else (e.g. a supplier) has changed something and either not told us or we did not recognize the importance of the change at the time. Regardless of the origin of the problem, sometimes we have to troubleshoot a part of our system.