What's with the drug shortages?

Specialties Emergency

Published

Specializes in ER, NICU.

What is with the shortages of morphine, epi, propofol and other various meds? A medic told me that they are also out of the 10ml epi syringes and have to use the ampules. Just wondering how many other facilities are being hit by this?

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Specializes in Trauma/ED.

Us too...ridiculous! We only have MS 10mg syringes (and run out of those all the time), no IV Lasix at all, barely any Propofol--only enough for boluses...out of Compazine or is it Reglan now...keeps changing back and forth.

Someone from pharmacy speculated that it has to do with the mass scramble to produce H1N1 vaccines last season but who knows.

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Specializes in EMS, ED, Trauma, CEN, CPEN, TCRN.

Yep, same here ... it seems to hit the cheaper drugs that probably don't make the manufacturers much money.

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is this a us thing. we use some of those meds all the time no shortage. however very fe drug come in syringe most come in vials.

the only shortage i know of is diamorphine that was several years ago, i never seen this med.

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The same thing is going on at our facility. We have no Morphine 2mg or 4mg, so if we get an order for 1 or 2mg, we have to use a 10mg vial and waste the rest. We're wasting so much morphine it's ridiculous!! And we also have no IV Lasix. I wonder how long this will last.....

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Specializes in Psychiatric Nurse.

We are even seeing this in the mental health field, the say that we are low on haldol but we always have the more expensive antipsychotics available.

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Specializes in Medsurg/ICU, Mental Health, Home Health.

They've done it...they've finally gone and done it...the patients have actually used all of the narcotics!

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Yes, we are out of 2 and 4mg morphine syringes. We had a few 5mg vials left but have used those up so just have 10mg left now. Also short on IV lasix 10mg. The scariest thing now is that we are out of both epinephrine and amps of d50, so much so that we can't even stock the crash carts with them anymore...!!??!?

They originally told us these problems would be corrected by the end of June. Clearly....not so much.

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We've experienced it with Heparin 100 units/1ml vials. I work on an oncology floor and almost every patient has a PICC or PAC. Yesterday, we had to dig through every crevise in our drug carts to see if we could pull together enough heparin units to flush a patient's PAC before d/c. All other patients were left running KVO. Last night I had crazy dreams trying to find Heparin throughout the hospital!

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Specializes in EMS, ED, Trauma, CEN, CPEN, TCRN.

We're short on Heparin as well. We're short on a lot of things! We have a limited Pyxis anyway -- we're a 15-bed, freestanding ED, so we don't have a pharmacy on site. Last week we had to rob our Pyxis and all our RSI kits so I could mix a Vecuronium drip (yes, a Vec drip) for an intubated patient. We literally used every last vial of Vec. Crazy. And scary!

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Specializes in Public Health, TB.

My understanding about IV Lasix is that the factory burned down!

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Specializes in Medsurg/ICU, Mental Health, Home Health.
the only shortage i know of is diamorphine that was several years ago, i never seen this med.

Diamorphine is heroin. Oddly enough there is no shortage of that particular substance in my neck of the woods...

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