1) Does your institution allow for hydroxyzine to be given IV?
2) If you can give IV is it limited to certain patient populations only?
3) If you can give IV what safeguards do you have surrounding it's IV administration to avoid extravasation?

Thanks,

Randi

ISMP is beginning the process of developing the new 2018-2019 Targeted Medication Safety Best Practices for Hospitals. We would like ideas from you for either issues that need a best practice, or the best practice itself. Remember the criteria is that these are issues that have cause serious harm or death over many years, and can be addressed by one or two best practices in most cases. Please respond to this posting, or send me an email at drich@ismp.org. Thanks for your input.

Hello all,

Could anyone share their inpatient policy or guidelines outlining sodium content (min and max mEq/L) allowed in maintenance IVF? We would like to establish guidelines for pharmacist clarification on the general care units/ intensive care areas.

Thanks,

Jenn Bonvechio
Akron Children's Hospital

For those institutions that utilize continuous albuterol to ventilated patients via the Aerogen nebulizer, can you tell me what syringe pump you are using to delver the medication into the Aerogen nebulizer?

We want to use our Alaris pump but are getting significant push back over the concern for inadvertent IV administration. Aerogen makes specialized syringes and tubing that are incompatible with all IV set ups and we would be utilizing this.

Any thoughts on what other institutions do would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Randi

We recently identified a potential issue with our extended infusion zosyn administration when we found that one of our parter hospitals was routinely following up each dose with a 50ml NS minibag. When experimenting I found that our infusion pumps will stop running once the aid in the tubing reaches our pumps, as they are designed to do. Unfortunately, this means that in many cases 15-18 ml of fluid may remain in our primary infusion sets. When reviewed with nursing staff we found that there is significant variation in practice.

Below is a description of an event that caused quite a concern for our nurse (and me!). I would appreciate your collective experience and wisdom on the safety implications.

Hello,

Friends and Colleges,

Members of the ASHP Medication Safety Section Advisory Group are partnering with members from the Section of Pharmacy Informatics and Technology to learn how we can better partner together to improve patient safety. We would like feedback from as many people as possible:

I wanted to poll the group to see how your Health Information System is set up for providers to search for a drug name. We're doing some clean ups in our system and we decided to revisit this decision since part of the system clean-up revealed that it's inconsistent.

Specifically:
1. Are all the drugs searchable by both brand and generic
2. Are only a subset of drug categories searchable by both brand and generic---otherwise only generic? Which categories..
3. Are drugs only searchable by generic name.

Thanks.
D.Patrick

We are a Cerner hospital and was wondering how other hospitals screen for drug-food interactions. This was brought to our attention from TJC gap analysis.

Thank you for your help.