- Joined
- Mar 16, 2010
- Messages
- 369
- Reaction score
- 223
Phenylephrine 1% costs about $3 a vial. It's nothing compared to the cost of surgery, anesthesia, and hospitalization. I wouldn't worry too much about its charge.Sorry, I thought you meant to make one bag up for the day. My objection to drawing up 1 vial of 10mg/mL and making 1 100cc bag for the day and then using it for every patient is very simply that I don't know how to assign that in terms of charge for the patient. If I do that before first starts and then used the bag to make a stock and then used new, fresh syringe from that each day, I wouldn't know how to charge any patient. So I'd have to make a new bag each case. I could easily make the bags for each case, but that is another charge as well for the patient. Certainly one to consider. Thankfully with good labeling, handoffs, and physical separation of the drug from the other syringes (I also lay out all the drugs I'm going to use for case --- with protamine being the exception. I don't draw that up until we're rewarming) I've never had an issue. That said, I'm not opposed to making a bag for each case. As was suggested above, one bag for the day would make me uncomfortable.
You commented earlier about not wanting bubbles in your syringe of 10mg/ml phenylephrine. Why does that matter? You're going to inject it into a plastic bag.
Anyway, you may trust your labelling, but in the heat of the moment, if someone else is in your room and has a hypotensive patient, they may reach for any syringe with a phenylephrine label on it and inject before reading the dosage. Yeah, people with experience will recognize that a syringe with just 1ml of phenylephrine is wierd, but some people may not think twice about it. If you think about the Swiss cheese model for medical errors, this is a hole you can easily patch.