Is anyone willing to share their Patient own medication policy ?
We are revamping ours- and I will tell you that we are actively interested in learning what others are doing.
thanks in advance !

We are evaluating our EMR alert threshold for changes in weight.
I was wondering what the threshold is in other hospitals for alerting the clinicians when a weight change is considered significant and possibly erroneous at the time of typing into the flowsheet, ordering weight based meds, and verifying.

What is the threshold based on (industry standard, evidence of normal weight changes in the hospital, etc)?

Thank you,
Eliana

Hi,

We are evaluating our med safety program to determine if we are resourced appropriately. We're hoping to benchmark ourselves against other institutions. I would appreciate any of the following information:

How many med safety FTEs do you have?

Total # beds covered?

# of hospitals?

If more than one, does each hospital have designated med safety resources?

Does hospital med safety cover ambulatory sites?

What metrics do you use to evaluate med safety resources?

Our current process for weight-based infusions is to use the current weight documented at the time the weight-based infusion is ordered. This leads to different weights for different infusions based on when the infusion is ordered during the admission. We have recently discovered that the weight is rarely updated when a new weight-based infusion is added to the pump. Leading to a discrepancy in the actual total amount of drug infusing versus what is being documented in the chart. Curious if anyone can provide insight on their current practice, specifically:

How do organizations with Epic and Omnicell handle patient-specific controlled substances (i.e. methadone)?

We currently load patient-specific syringes into a miscellaneous narcotic bin in the Omnicell, but the Omnicell does not prompt the RN to pull from this bin, causing nurses to believe that it is not available. Interested if other organizations practice similarly or if you have found a better way?

Thanks,
Sloane Hoefer
Med Safety Pharmacist
Nebraska Medicine

Have any of you moved to administering Keppra as IV push instead of the premade IV piggybacks? If so, how did you justify the vial saying "MUST DILUTE"?

Hi I'm wondering how your facilities handle flushing the medication tubing after administering an IV medication. I'm specifically asking about the medication IV tubing and not the port/line access flushing. Do you use a prefilled saline flush vs IV fluid bag vs something else?

I haven't been able to find standards of practice on this. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place.

We are beginning to take a closer look at opioid utilization in the inpatient setting with the goal of reducing use of opioids, especially IV route, in our inpatient adult surgical population. There are both safety (less adverse events) and economic (reduction of LOS) reasons to pursue this. While some of our service lines have had ERAS protocols in place, we would like to take a more holistic approach for all service lines by developing guidelines and revising order set(s).

Greetings,

I am wondering what other institutions/health systems are using for risk mitigation strategies with HD Fluzone due to the risk with two (2) syringes being in a single packet and administration to a single patient?

To date we are formulating a Nursing Safety Alert, but no other strategies have been implemented. Are other sites using CPOE warnings, Pyxis Alerts, unpackaging the doses, etc?

All input appreciated.

Thank you,
Karen

Trying to determine if any other institutions call epinephrine 10 mcg/mL anything other than Epi-sticks. At our hospital, it's commonly referred to as epi "spritzers" and, since that is always how I've known it, I didn't think it was weird until I brought it up at a system meeting. Our nurses asked if we could put "spritzer" in as an alias name for it, but I do worry that might actually be making the problem of using nicknames for drugs worse if I do this.