Infusion room setup

RNPATL, DNP, RN · Jun 7, 2005

I'm in the process of setting up an infusion room for short stay patients on a medical floor. They're logged in as "outpatients in a bed." They mostly get series antibiotics or steroids. Any suggestions on P & P, order sets or charting standards?

When I set up and opened my first infusion room (also known as our infusion center) ... the patients were also counted as outpatient .... we did not have beds in the infusion center ... we had high grade recliners that were amazingly comfortable. Anyway - we set each patient up as a recurrent patient and had active orders for each as well as blood work pre-ordered by the physician. The patient would come in BID or whatever was ordered. Each time they would come in, we would get a set of vital signs, complete an assessment, flush the PICC or port (whatever they had) and start the infusion. Many times, these were young people that were on their lunch break and time was generally of the essence. Anyway - we did have P&P that covered our abbreviated assessment. We did not have order sets, as we wanted the physicians to clearly spell out what services they wanted their patients to have. Besides, my CNO did not like order sets and refused to allow us to use them. They would have come in handy ... for sure!

Does this help? Our Infusion Center became VERY popular and we actually were thiniong about opening a second room as the chair would never get cold and the patients loved the convenience. We also did chemo and blood transfusions, different types of injections too. Good luck!