melly

So far we've been together 9 years, married 5. :) As long as you are professional about it, I don't see that there should be a problem.

I married a pharmacist that I met at work. It's great. We still work in the same hospital, but different shifts now. Melanie

My hospital stopped mixing drugs on the floor many years ago. This was prompted by a terrible incident in which a patient had KCL pushed straight into his HL. The nurse mistook the vial for a flush solution. He died of cardiac arrythmmias. Vials of KCL are not kept on the floor, too easy to grab the wrong bottle in a rush. The other major hospital in our area stopped allowing nurses to mix their own IVs several years ago after the same scenario happened to an infant who also died. Now the pharmacy uses the premixed bags of KCL IV fluid unless there is a special order in which case they mix the bag. All of our other drips come in premixed bags with standardized concentrations. My husband is a pharmacist and he just raised the question of sterility. All of the IVs that are mixed in our hospital are done so under a Laminar hood to provide a sterile field. This incudes TPN and any drugs that are mixed for OR use. Is there a hood available for mixing or is it just done in the middle of the med. room? As for being too expensive, all it takes is one lawsuit to justify the cost. I don't recall exactly how much the parents of the infant who died settled for, but it was in the millions . And that doesn't begin to cover the emotional toll on all involved. Believe me , the adminstration at our hospital is stingy,stingy but they haven't even thought about going back to making us mix our own meds.