"Bleed" an IV line

[gospa]

Quick question.

the other day day I was hooking up an insulin drip to a patient and a nurse asked me "Did you bleed the line already?" I assumed she meant did I prime the line already so it was free of air.

As I thought about it later I wondered if she was asking something else? What say you?

[beckster_01, BSN, RN]

5 years running insulin drips and I have NEVER heard about this? Our insulin comes in 250cc bags, which seemed wasteful to me as we discard after 24hours. I will have to look at our policy and ask our pharmacist but I'm pretty sure our institution doesn't do this...

[MursingMedic, DNP, RN, EMT-P]

I remember some study I read a couple years ago that showed certain tubing will absorb ~5-10% of the insulin over time. It is real, I swear.

I'm not sure if this was the specific paper I read or not, but give this a go. "Waste not, want not": determining the optimal priming volume for intravenous insulin infusions. - PubMed - NCBI

I've worked somewhere before where they had tubing that had a reduced absorption factor. Hella expensive if I recall so we ultimately did away with them.