Intravenous (IV) Bag Preparation: Special Considerations (Nursing)

00:00 Let's talk about some special considerations in regards to hanging IV fluids. Tubing should always be labeled and dated. Again, this is really important because once you start IV tubing, you usually want to change it about 72 hours but check your agency policy. We always want to maintain sterility and asepsis are very important when we're connecting each tubing to the bag and making sure that we're keeping the end of our equipment clean and scrubbing the hub to make sure we're preventing infection. Tubing should be traced from the patient to its source for infusion validation. Not all solutions also are compatible. So I can't stress this point enough that any time you hang IV solutions, sometimes you may have to hang something else with it. You have to make sure those play well together. The other thing is you can check your pharmacy or maybe your medication administration record for resource. Really important that each solution that you give are compatible with each other and don't cause adverse reactions for your patient. And lastly, infusing large amounts of air from unprimed tubing can be dangerous. Now this takes a lot of air, but why it's so important to make sure you prime your IV solution all the way to the end of the tubing.