Iv medication question

[J3wl5]

I need some help answering this IV medication question. Also, if someone could explain it to me, it would be great :)

Doctor's order: Flagyl 500 mg in 100 mL D5W to infuse over 45 minutes.

The IV tubing drop factor is 10 gtt/mL. When the IV has infused at the correct rate for 20 minutes, the patient will have received how much Flagyl?

[Madras]

Hi J3wl5!

Welcome to AN! We're glad to help with homework etc but please show your work so that we can see exactly where you need help.

[Esme12, ASN, BSN, RN]

Welcome!

We are happy to help but we do not do the work for you....show us what you think and we will start there....:)

[pmabraham, BSN, RN]

Good day, J3wl5:

I've found dosagehelp.com to be a fantastic resource to learn and practice dosage calculations. While I believe learning the Desire / Have * Quantity formula for doing dosage calculations is a good start, I strongly recommend learning the dimensional analysis method as well. See

to start learning more about dimensional analysis. Per the previous posters (PP), can you please share with us the math you did along with the answer you got from that math?

Thank you.

[Kuriin, BSN, RN]

I am practicing this for my medication calculation and I do have one question for those who know the answer. Is this question asking how many milligrams the patient has received of the drug, or how many mL is remaining? Seems to be the former, lol.

[pmabraham, BSN, RN]

Good day, Kuriin:

"When the IV has infused at the correct rate for 20 minutes, the patient will have received how much Flagyl?"

My understanding is how many mL (which does have a relationship to the mg) the patient received (vs. how much is remaining).

Thank you.

[loving2024, BSN, RN]

The question is not asking this:

(100ml/45min)×(10gtt/ml)=22gtt/min

But the question is asking how many Flagyl has been infused at the correct rate (22gtt/min) in 20 min

So 500mg of flagyl/45 min is 11mg/min, then how many mg infused in 20 min is (20×11)=220mg

[Kuriin, BSN, RN]

Well, if you want to find the entire answer (I believe my calculations are correct...I hope :) -- which would include both the mL as well as the mg.

500/100 shows that it is 5mg/mL

We know that in 20 minutes, the patient will have been infused with 44.444 repeating (rounded down to 44)mL.

Because we know that 5mg is in each mL, we can calculate 5*44 to get 220mg.

Or you can just do the exact same way loveofrn did it, lol. Probably less confusing that way.

[loving2024, BSN, RN]

Lol just stick with the method that works for you

[smf0903]

The tubing factor is a distraction in the problem, it has nothing to do with the answer.

If someone said to you "I just gave the patient 20mL of Flagyl", what would that mean to you? It wouldn't mean a thing because the Flagyl could have been put into a 50mL, 100mL, 500mL, 1000 mL bag, etc. The question asks "how much Flagyl?" The med is measured in mg so the answer to "how much med" will be in mg.

The set-up of this problem is very simple, don't over think it :)

[Roman1]

I know people want to be helpful and everything, but how is providing the calculations and answer helping the OP out. The OP needs to learn how to think these calculations out on his/her own in class and clinical. Copying the calculations and answer from here is not doing the OP any good. We need to see the OP's thought process to enable him/her to identify where they are going wrong in calculating the answer, and to guide them in the correct way. The OP is not going to have AN there during testing.

I don't care if people get defensive about this post. I feel that it is really a disservice to hand out answers. In the real world and especially in nursing you are not going to have someone holding your hand to spoon feed you answers.

OP I really recommend you get a good drug calc book and look at the website and you tube video cited in a previous post. Now that you have the calculation and answer I really recommend you still work through the problem, so that you understand how the calculations were done and how the answer was arrived at.

Good luck with school!

[loving2024, BSN, RN]

I solved the question because pmabraham thinks the question is asking how many ml the patient has received and also because Kuriin was not sure whether the question is asking how many ml or mg the patient has received. I solved the question not only for the OP but for other people to be able to solve this type of question.