how to know if the glucometer is accurate?

[chatter]

the nursing home i work in has several brittle diabetics. about a month ago one of them kept dropping in the middle of the night i notified the doctor and she suggested that she might be receiving too much s/s due to an inaccurate glucometer. i compared 2 brands and she was right one read almost 175 mg higher than the other, so the facility changed glucometers. a few nights ago i ran controls on the machine and it read lo i notified administration. 2 days later i come back and the old machines were back in use!!!! they insist on buying these machines from wal-mart!! i love wal-mart but dont trust this machine. what do i do now?:angryfire

[canoehead, BSN, RN]

In the hospital we need to do controls every 24h. I suggest you do controls at the beginning of your shift, and document if they don't pass. That way you can show you have taken reasonable care to make sure the sugars are accurate, and with enough inaccurate controls they mey be forced repair or switch machines.

If someone is showing symptoms of hypoglycemia but the test is normal I would still treat them, or at least call EMS for a second sugar from an accurate machine.

[jmgrn65, RN]

Run controls every 24 hours, also you can repeat the test. It should read about the same, also some machine don't read correctly if they don't have enough blood.