Do you share the Nebulizer units (machines)?

[ann7]

Each patient has their own labeled tubing and mask. Are we allowed to have one nebulizer unit in a room with 2 patients to share one nebulizer unit (machine) ? These are the small portable nebulizer units.

[NurseQT]

Our neb machines have to be cleaned once removed from a resident's room and before it can be placed in another resident's room. Once an item goes into a resident's room it has to be thrown away or cleaned before re-use. I would think the same applies to resident's who share a room.

[CapeCodMermaid, RN]

Each resident has their own nebulizer. If they get discharged, the machine goes back to the O2 company.

[motherof3sons]

Each resident has their own....when they are finished with it, it gets returned to company. Neb txs are all at the same time so that would be very inconvenient if I had to wait for A bed to finish his to give it to B bed, yk?

[HeyNurse2014, ASN, RN]

yup. At one place I worked it was pretty common to go "borrow" one from a resident who wasn't using it at the moment. The facility would occasionally buy one or two new ones to replace broken ones. (For whatever reason these were often found broken on the floor.) Hence the need to "borrow". Still it all got very old trying to find a working unit for a neb treatment.

[CoffeeRTC, BSN, RN]

Our facility owns the nebulizer machines. We finally have a ton of them. Probably near 20 for a 50 bed facility. We seem to have alot of COPDers in the area and of course chronic bronchitis and pneumonia flare ups.

In the past, when we rented them from pharmacy, we never seemed to have enought and had to "borrow" them or share. If that was the case, we just wiped them down between patients.

[mikijam03lpn]

Well you should clean it, if you are going to use with somebody else. But you know you can your oxygen as a neb machine, just hook up the tubing to a oxygen and thats it. You can do this until you get a new nebulizer machine.