There is a huge blowup at my hospital lately about the practice of priming an antibiotic line with normal saline first.
The nature of our EMR system automatically names some things - like Zosyn, Iron, and K-riders - piggybacks. As I've always understood, a piggyback should be administered as a secondary line, but these are often ordered on patients who are saline locked and do not have a primary line.
In addition, even when running as a primary, we were taught initially to prime the line with a small amount of normal saline to avoid wasting medicine when trying to get bubbles out. It is, after all, part of our protocol to flush lines a couple times a day with a 10CC flush, so no one thought any differently of a few CCs of saline to prime tubing.
However, our hospital has decreed that this is "nurses practicing medicine" and that we are not allowed to do so. I do understand their point, but I also see how frustrating it is from the point of a nurse to waste small piggybacks like iron in an attempt to get air bubbles out of the line.
I've worked in several places and had never had an issue with line priming with saline, so I wanted to see, from the allnurses standpoint, your thoughts and how things typically work at other facilities.
