Our organization completed the ISMP IV push safety gap analysis survey. Our improvement opportunities were to:
1. clearly define who has privileges to perform IV push medication preparation and administration
2. define in policy the difference between IV push and a bolus medication

How does your organization define the privileges and IVP versus a bolus?

Thank you very much,
Andrea Gimpel-Blanchard, PharmD
Director of Pharmacy
MaineGeneral Medical Center
Augusta, ME 04330

Does anyone use this diluted form of epinephrine at their hospital for hypotensive patients? our ED physicians have been using this push dose over other pressors due to it's effects on both alpha and beta receptors. They are drawing up and diluting this on their own which is a huge concern for safety risks and dilution errors. Wondering if anyone has experience with this and how we can provide this med without causing confusion with 1 mg/ml concentrations or 1mg/10ml carpujects used in ACLS code blue situations.

Hi all, A month or two ago there was a thread about infusion pump committees and I noted my org has a well-oiled group and associated charter. For those of you who wanted to see that, please see attached. The interdisciplinary aspect of this group is indispensable. It's the best functioning team in which I participate across the entire organization. One of our accomplishments given coordination between nursing, pharmacy, biomed, and materials management has been achieving > 90% pumps with the new library within 1 week of library release.

We had a pt. receive a chemo which they should not have due to their renal function. Our hospital pharmacy also is responsible for the infusion room patients as we do not have a separate infusion center pharmacy. We routinely verify plts and ANC prior to dispensing chemo and crcl for Carboplatin. I would like to expand our lab monitoring to prevent an error of this sort again.
Would anyone be willing to share which labs are routinely monitored by pharmacy prior to dispensing ?

Does anyone have any useful resources to help guide practices when warming IV solutions. Specifically looking for standards or literature to help with determining a BUD. thanks!

Hello All
We are assessing our utilization of Multi-Dose Vials for chemotherapy IV compounding in a USP800 fully-compliant hazardous IV cleanroom. We would like to better understand specific practices around the use of MDVs if using the same vial on more than one patient. What has been your risk assessment.

Questions:
(1) Do you use MDVs for chemotherapy compounding?

Hello,

For anyone who has cameras in their medication rooms...how long do you retain the video footage for? Is there a standard for this type of thing that anyone knows of?

Thank you,
Lauren

I am hoping someone out there has had an epiphany on how to handle "STAT" drugs that are straight draws, like fosphenytoin and oxytocin, with USP 800 regulations. If you are allowing the nurse to draw them up, how are you documenting that in your Assessment of Risk? If you are having pharmacy draw them up, how are you communicating that with OB, Neuro, ED, etc?

Over half of our 13 hospitals have non-24 hour pharmacies. We are trying to figure out how to have a consistent process in all hospitals at all times...which we realize is a tall order.

Good Morning All! We prepare certain aerosols in Pharmacy for nebulization. Currently, we dispense these agents from Pharmacy in syringes. I would like to move away from this practice. Has anyone identified an alternative/unique dispensing device for this purpose? Thanks in advance!

Our organization has recently been reviewing override data from our Alaris Guardrails and adjusting max/min for medications that are causing a high percentage of overrides. Propofol has emerged as an outlier for our organization in our ICU. Our current soft min is set at 50 mcg/kg/min but a large portion of our patients at certain hospitals are averaging 100-150 mcg/kg/min. I am wondering what other organizations have done with regard to limits on this medication since there are recommendations to try to maintain infusion rates below 67 mcg/kg/min to prevent PRIS.