Antibiotic infusions: primary vs. secondary

PLEASE NOTE:   Posts made to this forum should not be considered as the expressed opinions of, nor should be considered endorsed by, the Medication Safety Officer’s Society (MSOS) or the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP). 

Make sure your email is up-to-date
In order to continue to receive updates from MSOS, as well as forum posts and other valuable information as a member of MSOS, please be sure to update your email address with us, whenever it changes. If you need assistance doing so, please send an email to jrufo@ismp.org. 

1 post / 0 new
Log in or register to post comments
Wed, 09/26/2018 - 09:36
#1
Stacie Ethington
Stacie Ethington's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 days 1 hour ago
Joined: 12/07/2016 - 11:14
Antibiotic infusions: primary vs. secondary

I am part of a 500+ bed, urban, academic organization. As far as antibiotic infusions go, we currently only run Zosyn as a primary infusion (run over 4 hours); our other antibiotic infusions are run as a primary/secondary set up. During the normal saline shortage, we ran all antibiotics primary and flushed with a 10 mL flush post infusion. Now that we are able to go back to our primary/secondary set up, we are getting some pushback from nursing.

How does your organization infuse IV antibiotics?

We feel the benefits of running as a primary/secondary set up are:
-minimizes lost volume during priming
-risk of patient not receiving full ordered dose is minimal
-not ALL meds have the same volume/overfill so having varying practices for when to use primary/secondary set up would be non-standardized, thus, not desired

Thanks for your help.
Stacie Ethington
Medication Safety Nurse Specialist
Nebraska Medicine

Tags: 

Top