help calculating waste amounts from pca syringes

Nurses General Nursing

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Specializes in hospice, ortho,clinical review.

No, not kidding....wish I would have seen this as a student.

I'm not getting the concept rapidly and it's ticking me off. Because we take these things down fast and in general mornings move fast so I'm not getting to study the darn thing like I want and I can't find pics on the web.

Anyway we deal primarily with morphine and dilaudid syringes. I think it's morphine is 5mg to 1 ml and dilaudid is 1mg to 1 ml. However I could have reversed that, I worked with both.

It's not helping that some nurses count backwards on the syringe and some count forwards,(they either flip the syringe or not) I think the morphine might have 150mls total. So that may explain why they count by 100, 75, 50 etc... But then one nurse said when you figure it out you can count line by line then multiply by 5! I get that would be the one w/the 5:1 but still....Help!

I seriously don't know if I'm making any sense at this point. But I just want the easiest way of looking at these and figuring out which way is better. Which way to count. Which way to look at the darn syringe. I don't know why math calculations are easier at this point, probably b/c they follow a formula. I thought I could read a syringe...now these things....:rolleyes:

Specializes in Med/Surg, Ortho, ASC.

All you need to know is the concentration (mg/ml) and the # of mls left in the syringe. You can calculate later. Matters not whether the syringe is right side up or upside down, the # of mls will be the same, concentration will be the same.

Yup, what s/he ^^ said. For example, if the drug comes in a 0.2mg/ml syringe and there are 33 mls left to be wasted, you would multiply 33 by 0.2, giving you 6.6mg to be wasted.

It doesn't matter if the syringe is held upside down--you should get the same value, no matter how you hold it. hth

Specializes in hospice, ortho,clinical review.

Thanks..yes that makes sense.

However I was with a different preceptor today who finally explained the 5 vs 25 countdown depending on if it's dilaudid or morphine and I got it with her explaination. She was able to explain why you flip it and each line = "x amt" so it totally made sense the 1st time she did it. Go figure when you get people that know the right way to explain something that it clicks the 1st time. Still think it's goofy it took her explaination, but whatever I get it now.

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