Diabetes Mellitus

Nursing Students Student Assist

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Your client has started eating breakfast and you haven't taken their blood sugar yet. What should you do? When would you give their insulin?

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Specializes in Urgent Care NP, Emergency Nursing, Camp Nursing.

The practicing nurses may have a better answer, but my inclination is to go with STAT, make a note of it in the chart, and to make sure you (or the UAP working under you) gets the accuchecks done before handing out the meal trays in the future.

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Specializes in Nursing Professional Development.

Your hospital should have a policy in place that would cover that situation. Follow that.

If this is a homework assignment ... then I would follow the guidelines that your instructor gave you (or that your recommended texts give you). It may depend on the individual patient and their personal glucose management protocol.

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

as a working nurse this happened occasionally. i got the fingerstick immediately and noted that it was taken as the patient was eating breakfast. sometimes it turned out that the blood sugar hadn't elevated yet since it takes time for some of the sugars to get into the blood stream. and, yes, i would definitely give the patient their insulin. if i didn't, they would get hyperglycemic.

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Specializes in Acute Care, Rehab, Palliative.

I did this at work once and was instructed to take the blood sugar right away and administer the insulin accordingly(the pt was on sliding scale).

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Specializes in Critical Care-Neuro/Trauma ICU.

In reality I would take the blood sugar immediately, note in the chart that it wasn't done until after the patient started to eat, then administer insulin based on their order/sliding scale. However, we as students know that there is a RIGHT answer ( what you would do in "real life" as a nurse) and a CORRECT answer...the correct answer being that of your book and or instructor. I would ask them for verification on this issue. Also, it's going to depend on the facility's policy.

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