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Welcome to Administering Intravenous Medications or IV meds. We're going to take a look
in this series how to give IV push meds through a patient's IV. Also how to give IV push
meds through a continuous primary line. And also how to hang a secondary or otherwise
called a piggyback medication. So before we start anything, we need to look at a few things
first before we give our IV medicines. We're always going to need gloves so don't forget
that. We want to perform our hand hygiene. And then we want to make sure whatever
equipment that we're going to give that we inspect that appropriately especially your IV
medication in a vial or even a bag. Many times a solution can come with particles or some
abnormal discoloration or cloudiness. If this is the case, we need to not give that to our
patients and check with our pharmacist. Also, make sure you're using the right tubing for
the right IV medication so you want to ensure that as well. Next, we want to prepare the
environment. And then we need to make sure we verify the order and the patient data. So
really important that we're giving the right IV medication to the right patient. We also
want to make sure it's the right patient. Check the allergies of that and again verify the
order. We also want to redo our hand hygiene before we give anything to our patient or
come in contact with them. We want to explain the procedure to the patient "Hey this is
Mr. Jones, I'm here to give your IV antibiotic" for example. We want to assess the patient's
baseline condition. So why this is important before you give any IV medication? This could be
maybe like an IV blood pressure medicine for example. We want to make sure the patient is
awake, stable, maybe their normal baseline blood pressure is stable before we give a blood
pressure lowering med for example. We want to put on our gloves and then we want to
assess the IV site for patency. What we mean by this? Before you give any IV medication,
first things first. Does the IV work appropriately? If it does not, we do not want to infuse
medications in that because our patient we don't know how much they're going to get. Also,
we're going to be wasting medication as well. So, do this right before you go give the
medication to the patient through their IV. Make sure that IV works. Then we need to check
for compatibility of the medication if we're giving maybe an IV push drug through an existing
primary IV line, and I'll show you a little bit about that later.