Welcome to a new year at CAMS; I’m excited about what’s ahead.

If you work in environmental monitoring, you’ll know the pace of change has accelerated. Annex 1 has sharpened expectations, real-time systems keep making headlines, and cleanroom teams everywhere are being asked to do more with the same (or tighter) resources.

So for the first Gethin’s Diary post of 2026, I want to share a simple idea that often gets overlooked:

You don’t always need to change your whole monitoring technology. Sometimes, you just need to change the sampling device.

The temptation: “We need something completely new”

At the start of a year, it’s common to see big programmes kick off:

• new monitoring platforms
• new data systems
• new approaches to contamination control
• and, increasingly, new “real-time” solutions

Some of these initiatives are absolutely the right move, especially if your facility is changing or your risk profile is rising.

But I also see something else: teams feeling pressured into major change because their monitoring results feel too quiet, their investigations feel inconclusive, or they’re worried an auditor will ask tougher questions than last year.

And that can trigger the assumption: “We need a completely different technology.”

Often, you don’t.

What most teams already have (and why it’s not the enemy)

Let’s be clear: the fundamentals of viable monitoring are not broken.

Agar plates are understood. Growth is understood. Trending, limits, investigations, and microbial ID workflows are established. Regulators understand them too.

That matters, because in a regulated environment, “proven” is not a dirty word. It’s a form of risk reduction.

So if your core EM approach is already validated and embedded, the real question becomes:

Where is the weak link?

In many cases, it’s the sampler.

The weak link: why the sampling device changes everything

Your sampling device is the gateway between your environment and your data.

If that gateway is compromised, everything downstream is compromised too. This is true  no matter how good your plates are, how well your incubators run, or how robust your SOPs look on paper.

An outdated sampling device can quietly undermine your EM programme by:

• reducing viable recovery (collecting organisms poorly, or damaging them on impact)
• introducing inconsistency (variable collection performance across conditions)
• limiting sampling strategy (forcing short samples when longer monitoring is needed)
• creating false confidence (results look fine because the sampler isn’t seeing what’s there)

And the tricky part is: none of this is obvious day-to-day. It only becomes obvious when you have a real contamination event, a difficult investigation, or a tough inspection.

Why “changing the sampling device” is such an attractive lever

A full technology overhaul is expensive and disruptive. It can also add validation workload, training, change control, and (depending on the tech) new questions from regulators.

By contrast, changing the sampling device for a monitoring device can be:

• faster
• lower risk
• less disruptive
• and high impact

You keep the things that already work (plates, incubation, trending, microbial ID), but you significantly improve the quality of what you’re collecting.

That’s why I’ve seen sampling to monitoring device upgrades deliver meaningful gains without the pain of a wholesale system rewrite.

What to look for in an upgrade

If you’re considering a sampling device change, I’d encourage you to focus on performance characteristics that actually affect outcome:

1) Biological collection efficiency
Not “how much air it moves”, but how well it recovers viable organisms reliably.

2) Impact velocity and viability preservation
Too aggressive and you may damage organisms. Too weak and capture performance suffers. You want controlled performance that supports consistent recovery.

3) Sampling duration flexibility
Can you monitor for longer periods without compromising the sample? This matters more as Annex 1 expectations push towards better coverage and stronger rationale.

4) Validation you can defend
Not just “it meets the standard”, but evidence you can include in a validation pack and stand behind.

A practical example: why slit-to-agar matters here

One reason we’ve stayed committed to slit-to-agar monitoring is that it supports the “don’t change everything” philosophy.

You can keep your core tech, such as agar plates and the existing lab workflow, but improve the device performance and monitoring strategy significantly.

With slit-to-agar (and in our case a rotating plate), you get:

• active monitoring that works under airflow (rather than hoping something “settles”)
• the potential for longer monitoring strategies
• performance that can be validated and explained clearly
• a method that remains aligned with what regulators already understand

And crucially: you aren’t introducing an entirely new monitoring paradigm. You’re improving the reliability and defensibility of the one you already use.

A simple way to think about it in 2026

If you’re planning EM improvements this year, ask this before you launch a big “new technology” project:

Are we sure our sampling device isn’t the real constraint?

Because if your device isn’t collecting well, you’ll never fix the problem with dashboards, automation, or new reporting.

Better in. Better out.

If you want to explore this properly

A sensible next step is not a sales call. It’s a short technical conversation where we look at:

• what you’re sampling today
• where your pain points actually are (coverage, viability, investigations, confidence)
• and whether a simple upgrade would give you a meaningful improvement without major disruption

If that’s helpful, feel free to contact me, or explore the CAMS resources on slit-to-agar monitoring and validation.

Here’s to an exciting 2026.

~ Gethin