Anyone have an IV needs assessment tool?

[RNKPCE]

Many years ago I attended an IV therapy class in which the speaker talked about some hospital doing an IV assessment on each admission. This was to determine how long and what type of therapy the patient was going to need. If IV needs were to be more than just a couple days they had some way of determine if a PICC line would be better both for patient satisfaction, health and financial reasons.

Last week I was asked to start an IV on a elderly person who has a wound vac to her ??? don't remember. Her arms looked horrible from all the sticks. I didn't see anything I thought I could get so I asked the patient's nurse if a PICC line wouldn't be best as it looked like she was going to need IV antibiotics for a while. Eventually a Flex rn got a line and the nurse got an order for a midline to be put in the next day.

Wouldn't it have been nice to have done an IV needs assessment upon admission and avoided all those extra sticks. So if anyone has a tool they can email me or upload or advice let me know. I know our admission assessment is quite long already but I think this addition would be a great patient and nurse satisfier.

[iluvivt, BSN, RN]

You were on the right track....Midlines should only be used to administer medications and IVF that are isotonic or near-isotonic and most ABX do not fall in that range....if the ph of the abx was not between 5-9 you should have NEVER used it for that...and that is the standard of care that most nurses do not know about..they have a very limited use......You want to goto BARDs site and check out there Early assessment advantage program..some name like that you will see it on their site ..there are also many charts that I have seen...if you PM i will try to locate the recent one I saw..the other thing is that a pt may start out with a med that does fall within this parameter and then it gets changed and then someone who does not know uses it.......I only use them on rare occasions and after I have verified that nothing will change... I often have placed them when pts want to go home to die and only need them for a few days.....I see this quite a lot