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Discussion

Dosage question

Ok so I want to make sure my mind is on the right track, especially when it comes to admin. insulin. (FYI I have my first dosage test next Monday-1st semester in nursing school)

So the question is:

The physician orders insulin lispro 17 units subcutaneous. The medication is supplied in 100 units/mL. How many units will the nurse administer? ________ Shade the syringe

My thoughts: There is no conversion in units when it comes to insulin. Soooo....I was thinking the nurse needs to admin. 17 units (my answer) as stated by the physician. The syringe is in units so I should shade the syringe to 17.

Now if it wasn't an insulin medication but some other liquid medication that needs to be injected that is in units then I would of course use a different syringe (besides the ones specific for insulin) but I will convert those units into mL. Only in insulin injections there is no conversion, so whatever that order is that's what I need to pull out of the syringe....

So the order is 17 units and I need to pull 17 units out the insulin syringe

Am I on the right track?

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    • Featured Replies

    "The physician orders insulin lispro 17 units subcutaneous... How many units will the nurse administer?" Yep, just give what the doc ordered.

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    Yes, as stated above you are correct- good job!

    A lot of times they put a distractor in dosage calc questions- in this case you correctly identified it as the "the medication is supplied as 100units/ml". Don't be alarmed if you do not use every single bit of info they give you in these questions.

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    • Author

    Thank you both for the help! I over think things a lot.

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    Nice job. Like someone else stated, there are going to be plenty of dosage calc questions you see with a lot of unnecessary information. You just need to make sure you know what the question is asking, which you do. The keyword here is "units" when asking how much to give. If it was asking how many mL to give, then you would need to actually do the math and come up with the answer of 0.17 mL.

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