I&Os and weight of diapers

[fsaav]

I'm a student and I am currently in my pediatric rotation. My patient was a child who was potty-training so she wore diapers but at other times used the toilet. When recording I&Os I questioned how to document the weight of the diaper so that it was obvious that it was weight and wouldn't be confused with mls of urine. I was told that weight in grams equals mls and I should document it the same without any special notation needed. I was surprised by this and wanted to look more into it, but I haven't been able to find documentation so I wondered what your practice is and where I could find more information about this.Thanks.

[pedihemoncRN]

thats right, we do ours that way. i did find a site that you can go to, scroll down to the vloume section and you will see milliliters and grams listed as being equivalent.

http://www.bestfish.com/convert.html

volume:

1 cubic centimeter (cc, cm3)

• = 1 milliliter
  
• = 1 gram (water)
  
• = 0.061 cubic inch
  
• = 0.001 quart
  
• = 0.002 pint
  
• = 0.034 fluid ounce
  

[HealthShepherd]

Fsav: You are correct that the specific gravity of urine is higher than water, so 1g does not exactly equal 1ml. However, they are close enough to be treated as equal in the clinical setting. There are other sources of error in the I/O calculation that make this one quite insignificant (i.e. the amount of intake that gets dribbled instead of consumed; the amount of urine that sticks in droplets along the catheter tubing instead of collecting in the bag; the rounding and eyeballing that goes with weighing diapers and estimating how much urine is on the blankets...). But despite these sources of error, an I/O calculation will still tell you if a child is generally appropriate or oligouric or polyuric... don't worry too much about the precision of your numbers, just worry about which "ballpark" you're in.

Having said that, I admire your attention to detail and willingness to investigate something that doesn't add up to you... have you ever considered working in NICU?

[Whispera, MSN, RN]

Also, what goes in isn't pure water so 1 ml of it wouldn't weigh exactly 1 g, soooo....