Babies given wrong dose of Heparin @ Cedar Sinai

Siri,

Why were the babies in the hospital then? I assumed that they were preemies, but this picture shows apparently healthy babies who were definitely not in need of NICU care. What took both babies back to the hospital with a need for IV access?

It's obvious that you have never been a nurse, so please refrain from the quick judgement.

It's easy to pull a med from the pyxis, where it's always been and administer it like you always do. Especially if the wrong med is in the wrong spot.

This is an error, yes. Horrible, yes. But I wouldn't call it EXTREME carelessness. I won't throw stones on an error that can easily be my own.

Yep. I draw it up in a TB syringe.

It's interesting... one of our NNPs told me the other night that as long as a central line is running above a KVO rate with heparinized fluids, flushes don't actually NEED to be heparinized. We use straight saline for our PIVs, but gosh, can it be a bear trying to get heparinized fluid to flush a central/arterial line. Pharmacy is supposed to send us a bag each day for art lines, but after the intital placement, they don't send anything for PICCs. For a while people were just drawing off whatever art flush bag they could find, even for another patient, until someone helpfully pointed out what a massive infection control problem that was. Unfortunately, our pharmacy doesn't consider heparinized fluids a priority, so they can be really hard to get when you need them to flush a cranky PICC line.

They recall dog food that came from China last year,'' Quaid says. ``But they don't recall medicine that kills people if you give it in the wrong dosage. ... We think it's wrong.'

Debra Bello, a senior director at Baxter, explains why the company didn’t recall the old vials still in hospital storage rooms, from which the Quaid twins received their overdoses. "Because the product was safe and effective, and the errors, as the hospital has acknowledged, were preventable and due to failures in their system," says Bello, pointing out that ultimately, the person administering the drug should have read its label.