audrey_

yes I've heard of Lexicomp, I'm going to go through it and try to get more comfortable with some of the IV monographs & I will definitely try to request patients with more IV medications to get more practice! Thank you everyone for taking the time to respond! :)

also, after having reconstituted the med. how do you determine what size mini bag you use? is there a particular calculation you do to figure that out or is that purely just based on nursing judgement?

Thanks for all the responses everyone! I actually didn't know that there were hospitals/units where the pharmacy actually reconstituted your meds for you! I'm not sure if this mostly happens on highly acute units or maybe this is more common in the US..? I'm studying nursing in Canada and I have yet to see a unit where the nurses aren't the ones reconstituting their own meds! Man would that make life much easier on nurses! An example would be Piperacillin-tazobactam. I'm not sure why reconstituting this antibiotic always has me so confused!

I'm a nursing student in my second year of the RN program and I am having such a difficult time with IV reconstitution and it's really discouraging me in this program. I'm mainly just having a hard time really grasping how to read and know what numbers to pull from the parenteral drug manuals, and I'm not sure how to figure out what size IV fluid bag to then put the reconstituted medication in. I haven't had the opportunity to do many IV meds throughout my clinicals thus far and I don't feel like my school has put much effort into actually teaching us how to read parenteral manuals but instead just put us through medication administration exams which I don't struggle with at all but somehow only struggle when reading the actual manual. Can anyone help me with this or know of any good videos out there that can help me grasp this concept?