Nipride drip and no MRI/MRA?

CritterLover, BSN, RN · Feb 28, 2005

i don't think it has anything to do with the effects of the particular medicine. you can't take an iv pump into mri. this means that any drips that must go with the patient into mri has to be done on a dial-a-flow, which of course is not ideal. some hospitals won't allow it. but if the mri is absolutly neccessary, you don't have much of a choice. the other problem is that nipride drips are usually mixed at such a concentration that the cc/hr is pretty low, and dial-a-flows arn't very precise, and i don't think they go below 5 or 10 cc/hr. i once had a patient that needed an mri and was on dopamine at a rate that was too low for the dial-a-flow, so we had to mix some dopamine ourselves at a concentration that would allow us to titrate off the dial-a-flow. so it can be done, but it takes some work, and that mri has to be very important to take a patient unstable enough to need a vasoactive drip.

Elenaster · Feb 28, 2005

Great answer CritterLover!

I might add that Nipride is extremely potent and any sort of "accidental" bolus, even a really small one, could bottom out the patient's pressure, and trust me, you do not want to ever have to code someone in the scanner.

begalli · Feb 28, 2005

Also, if the patient is swanned, the temperature probe part of the swan has metal in it and unless the docs are willing to replace the swan with maybe a triple lumen or something, that patient can't go into the MRI. We've taken patients to MRI on drips before....what a pain in the butt those dial-a-flow tubings are!!!