Published
I suggest you follow policy and procedure for you facility. Check with your pharmacy and your formulary. There have been many studies with both oral and sublinguial nifedipine and pre-term labor being given ad a tocolytic. It can cause rapid drop in blood pressure which cardiac patients with cardiomyopathy are especially sensitinve to calcium channel blockers. Here are a few links.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=nifedipine+and+preterm+labor&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/260998-overview
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/260998-overview#aw2aab6b6
I work in with children who have had intestinal transplants. Not only are they young and unable to swallow pills, but many have oral aversions. We give many meds through GT/NGT/JT etc. When we have to give nifedipine, we puncture the capsule with a blunt tip needle and draw out the liquid medication. We know from our drug books that a 10 mg capsule has 0.34 mL of liquid in it, so we do our drug calculation and dilute it to make the concentration 1:1 with NS (for example, draw up 0.17 and mix with 5 mL of NS) so that it easier to draw up the correct dose. Sorry if this was confusing... :)
winter_green
114 Posts
At our L&D unit we are trying to minimize the use of terbutaline and have started to use Nifedipine (sublingual) to stop contractions.
We would puncture the capsule and squeeze the medication onto the patient's sublingually... now my question is, in the drug book it is advised to not puncture the capsule and administer sublingually because it can cause a sudden drop in BP.
Just curious how everyone else is administering Nifedipine???