liquid narcs

[angelbear]

Anyone have problems with the narc count when it comes to liquid narcs (ie. phenobabital). If so what did you do? Most of our bottles come with lines on them that are marked it 1ml increments. Some of the doses are like 9.4 ml and it is hard to tell how much is in there in between the measurement lines. So if you have a 400cc bottle and there should be 217.4 how in the world can you be sure that is how much is actually in there. This is an ongoing prob at my facility some think we should adjust and others feel it is subjective. Any advise or oppinions appreciated.

[angelbear]

I meant the lines are at 10ml increments sorry for any confusion

[sassynurse78]

Ours is almost always off. But we have noticed that they usually correct theirselves by the end of the bottle. It always seems like they are always filled too much to begin with, the liquid is over the lines. We do have some nurses that will actually measure out the liquid in med cups and poor it back into the bottle. We have also found out that if you flush like 10c because you are over ,to correct it, that we will be short again later. It looks like the pharmacy would come up with a better way to do this.

[RNonsense]

We run a tape strip along the side of the bottle and mark what we take each time as actual count. Anal...but effective. :)

[adrienurse, LPN]

Liquid narcs are my pet peeve. We use the pyxis system and pharmacy preloads the liquid in a 15cc syringe with a spacer. the syringes are forever leaking into the drawer and the counts are never correct.