ing the chance that someone will make a mistake," say researchers.
• Reduced waste. There's less wasting of medications with prefilled
syringes because they're measured out in their common dosage
amounts. If a medication comes in a 10-mL vial and the doctor admin-
isters 3 mL to the patient, you're wasting 7 mL (or at least you should
be!). Because prefilled syringes come in the dose you most often
need, there's little, if any, waste.
• Compliance. The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety
Goals stipulate that any drug that's drawn up in a syringe and not
immediately administered must be labeled with the name of the drug,
the concentration or amount and the expiration date if it's not going
to be administered in the next 24 hours. Prefilled, pre-labeled syringes
can help your facility comply with such rules while also saving time
and labor.
• Surgeon satisfaction. A doc who comes in one Thursday a month
requests a ropivacaine pain ball for each of his cases. We kept 1 pain
ball in inventory for him, but inevitably we'd run into trouble. Either
he wouldn't show one month and the pain ball would expire, or he'd
surprise us with 3 cases and we'd be out of stock. We considered
training the nurse circulator to draw that medicine up on the sterile
field in the OR, but that would have created a delay for the doctor.
Instead we turned to our compounder. Each month, we order precise-
ly the number of pain balls he'll need so we don't carry extras on the
shelves and risk having them expire. We tell all of our docs that if they
need something that we don't carry, give us 48 hours to order from
our compounder and we'll have it here for you. If need be, we can
arrange for overnight delivery. That $35 FedEx Express delivery fee is
well worth it to please our surgeons.
Overcoming sticker shock
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