measurement 0.5ml same as 0.50ml?

[ajfm]

my supervisor says it's different. she wants to make a clarification of order for lorazepam intensol 0.5ml to 0.50ml. is this right? i thought it's the same thing. isnt 0.5ml the same as 0.50ml???

[turnforthenurse, MSN, NP]

This is why you should never trail zeroes. It creates room for error.

[seizetheday]

my supervisor says it's different. she wants to make a clarification of order for lorazepam intensol 0.5ml to 0.50ml. is this right? i thought it's the same thing. isnt 0.5ml the same as 0.50ml???

Maybe she is assessing your critical thinking? Trying to see how well you know your stuff. I do this with students sometimes to see how confident they are in their answer.

[psu_213, BSN, RN]

Maybe she is assessing your critical thinking? Trying to see how well you know your stuff. I do this with students sometimes to see how confident they are in their answer.

Well, according to the OP this is a supervisor, not a clinical instructor. In which case, I think it's pretty bush league for a supervisor to try and trip someone up like this. (on the other hand, if they don't know that 0.5 = 0.50, then we have issues)

[ddunnrn]

As a scientist (Chemistry) and a nurse, I have two problems with adding the extra "0"--

1.) too easy to confuse as 50 ml when in a hurry

2.) nursing is trying to legitimize itself as a science, and therefore should follow accepted international scientific principles. When you put the extra "0" at the end, you are saying the actual measurement is somewhere between "0.49ml" and "0.51ml" because there is always some error in measurement. "0.5ml" means somewhere between "0.4 ml" and "0.6ml". It is very unlikely that you could measure the former so precisely with common syringes in common situations.

At my last job, I was always correcting narc count sheets (passive-aggressively ) when people would put ".5 ml" or just ".5" on half used vials, which should have been discarded anyways, but the point was that they should have put "1/2 ml" which reflect the limit of the precision of the measurement ( .5 ml implies that they could precisely measure between .4 and .6, and 1/2 means it"s somewhere between 0 and 1 )

Dave Dunn, RN

[TiffyRN, BSN, PhD]

Ask her to draw up two syringes (with something innocuous like NS or sterile water) with the two different measurements so that she may demonstrate to you the difference.

And I will reiterate what so many previous posters said about trailing zeros. It's a big no-no.

[oblivionenigma]

Ask her to draw up two syringes (with something innocuous like NS or sterile water) with the two different measurements so that she may demonstrate to you the difference.

Hands down one of the best responses to this thread yet! I would love to see this demonstrated.

I took the OP at face value, but as some posters have wondered, I'm now wondering if this were a supervisor being facetious or "testing."

But if that's the case, she sounds like a pretty bad teacher as it has obviously accomplished nothing but make a nurse question their knowledge!