Drug Administration

Nurses General Nursing

Published

Are there any tables available online to help know what meds can be given

with food, what should be given nocte, and interactions between meds?

We don't have computerised drug charts, or even computers available to us. I

had a couple of new admissions last night with a few pages of meds each. We

have standard times for rounds, with everyone trying to make the 0800 round

the one where most of the daily meds are administered.

I wondered if there was a quick way to check for interactions etc, something

I could put on the wall at work. It gets a bit complicated when meds are

ordered two hourly, tds, qid, and daily and you have a dozen or so to work

out for the patient. It averages 45 minutes to do all the paperwork for a

new admit.

Janine

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Specializes in Interventional Pain Mgmt NP; Prior ICU and L/D RN.

I don't know of any specific tables on line...I have always found my hospital pharmacy a wealth of info and they usually have some sort of printed info for us though.

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Specializes in Gerontological, cardiac, med-surg, peds.

Generally, if a patient is on more than 6 medications, it is nearly impossible to keep up with the side effects and the patient is in danger of polypharmacy (may be getting sick from receiving so many drugs).

A few drug interactions I can recall from my fuzzy brain:

Aminoglycoside antibiotics and antibiotics of the penicillin class should not be administered within one hour IV.

I am especially leery of Cipro, Tagamet, Septra, Coumadin, prednisone, the statins, and diuretics (lots of side effects and interactions).

A patient should not be receiving both a statin and Lopid (gemfibrozil) (high risk of rhabdomyolysis).

Don't use Toradol for more than 3 consecutive days.

Toradol and ibuprofen are contraindicated for pregnant women, especially in the last trimester.

Pt with nausea and vomiting? Check if they are on dig--may be dig toxic and this is often the first sign.

I am looking for online sites. I found one, written in layman's terms, from the US FDA. It has useful, though simplistic, information:

http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/fdinter.html

When I find other sites, I will post again. Hope this helps.

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