and affixing the labels, frees us up to focus on our many other respon-
sibilities.
• Safety. Then there's safety. Many medication errors occur at the
point of drawing up medication from identical-looking vials. Because
the medication is already premeasured and drawn up and ready to go,
you'll drastically reduce the potential for human errors in calculating
dose and concentration. You'll also remove the possibility of vial split-
ting and cross-contamination. You don't want your docs to use a sin-
gle-dose vial for multiple vials, but we all know that physicians rou-
tinely split vials rather than waste expensive drugs. We once knew a
doctor who would draw up 10 mL of neostigmine and put it in his
pocket (unlabeled!). He'd
give 3 mL to Patient A, go
get a snack in the cafeteria
and then pull the same
syringe out of his pocket
and give Patient B the same
medication.
A simulation study pub-
lished online last June in
the Journal of Patient
Safety found that medica-
tion error rates as high as
75% fell to the single digits
when nurses used prefilled
syringes vs. vial-and-
syringe methods. "Having
the medication predrawn
in a prelabeled syringe
goes a long way to reduc-
A U G U S T 2 0 1 7 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 3 9
• NO WASTE To ease usage and avoid waste, syringes are filled with the
most common dosages of each particular drug.
Jared
Sturgill
