blood transfusion

Nurses General Nursing

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what's the standard infusion rate for BT?

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Specializes in ER, ICU, Infusion, peds, informatics.

i don't really think there is a "standard rate," other than most policies require that the blood not hang longer than 4 hours.

how fast to give blood (and i'm assuming you mean packed cells), depends on how low the hct is, the patient's comorbidities, how large the iv is, what the vital signs look like, what the diagnosis is.

a trauma patient may get two or three units of blood in a matter of a few minutes.

an elderly lady with chf, decent bp, and just a "drifting" hct will get it as slow as allowed by facility policy.

then there are many different possibilities in between those two extremes.

in general, in a stable patient, i give each unit over about an hour. if the patient is unstable, i try to get each unit infused within about 15 minutes. that has a lot to do with the patient population i tend to deal with.

i worked at facilities where just about every patient got their two units of blood over 3 1/2 hours each, with lasix between the units.

hope that helps.

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Specializes in ICU/Critical Care.

I agree. I think it just depends on the patient and what is going on with that patient. If I had a CHF patient I'd run it over the 4 hours. If I had a liver transplant patient with a hemoglobin of 7, I'd run it almost wide open through their cordis, maybe over an hour at the most.

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Agree with the above. I start it out slower and after 15 minutes bump it up, depending on the patient.

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Specializes in Telemetry/Med Surg.
Agree with the above. I start it out slower and after 15 minutes bump it up, depending on the patient.

Same here

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Specializes in Infection Preventionist/ Occ Health.

Max rate for peds is generally 5 ml/kg/hour. However, it depends on the patients fluid status, past history of reactions, etc. I always ran it at abou 10 ml/hour for the first 15 minutes just in case.

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Each situation is so different that there really can't be a standard rate. Our policy is at least 2 hours per unit, no more than 4 (E.g., even if the unit is not done, you take it down after 4 hours). We cannot currently run blood on pumps (I KNOW!!!!!), so it's all guesswork on our part. We are SUPPOSED to get new pumps soon (actually we should have had them a month ago but there were problems with execution), so soon we will be able to run blood on pumps. Our infusion center CAN run their blood on pumps (they are too cheap to buy us all the special tubing), and I think their standard is about 2 hours per unit. Hope that helps!

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.

this is the blood transfusion: indications and administration guidelines in the u.s. government national guideline clearinghouse website:

it states within the text "a transfusion of a unit of red blood cells should not last longer than six hours."

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thank you very much guys! it really help me a lot!!! i love this site!!! hail nightingale!!!

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