what is an IV drip medication?

[konp]

In my ADN nursing program, we discussed what is a secondary IV bag (or what my instructors called IV Piggy Bag), but how my instructor is making us calculating an IV drip medication. What is exactly an IV drip medication? is it the same thing as IV piggy bag?

[anonymousstudent]

IV drip just means it's running through tubing - dripping into a drop chamber. You could set that manually or with a pump. Manually you are literally counting those drops in the chamber, with a pump you just input the data and it pulls out of the bag what you need for you.

Piggybacks are drips too. Piggybacks come in lots of different medications - common are piggybacks of antibiotics like vanco. They "piggyback" a main fluid bag, and are usually much smaller. An IV drip calculation is needed for something as simple as a bag of normal saline.

[MN-Nurse, ASN, RN]

IV drip just means it's running through tubing - dripping into a drop chamber.

It refers to a medication (in mg or units per hour) being delivered via continuous IV.

Some common drips are heparin, insulin, lasix, and protonix, but there are many more used in the ICU. You will see these listed as "gtt" in notes and nurses will refer to it, "That patient is on an insulin drip." You won't hear, "That patient is on a vanco drip."

You wont see maintenance fluids and antibiotics referred to as drips.

[anonymousstudent]

That may very well be technically correct, but here, anything that's running over a period of time, through a line, with a drip calculation, is a drip. If it's a push or bolus, that's different.