Lecturio Lab: IV Tubing in Practice (Nursing)

00:01 Hi. Welcome to our Lecturio lab.

00:03 Let's have some fun with IVs.

00:05 Now, you've already watched the video portion where we walked through how to do the calculation.

00:09 Let's look at a real-life setup that you can kind of put your hands on.

00:13 Well, at least I can. All right, here is the primary bag.

00:17 If you notice, it's got a thousand milliliters in it.

00:19 It's much bigger than the little, tiny IV piggyback we talked about.

00:23 This one just has 50 milliliters.

00:26 So this has one liter or a thousand milliliters.

00:29 This one has 50 milliliters. Now, let's take a look at the primary setup.

00:34 You've got right here the drip chamber.

00:37 We spike it into the bag.

00:38 It has a real spike into it that you pop that into the bag when you first open the IV. You want it to be about halfway full.

00:45 That way, you can see the drops dripping into the liquid.

00:49 Now, continue to follow the tubing down.

00:51 The first type of clamp you'll see is a slide clamp.

00:54 You just slide it up and it pinches off the tubing.

01:00 That's one of the way that we can stop the liquid from flowing from the bag.

01:03 Now, I'm going to release it.

01:05 So, it's no longer pinching the tubing.

01:07 Continue to follow the tubing down and look what we have here.

01:11 We've got a port.

01:12 Now, you follow this up, that's the secondary tubing.

01:15 That's our little, tiny 50 milliliter bag.

01:18 Now, it has a port where you can enter medication if you want to.

01:22 You can add the medication. Sometimes nurses do that.

01:25 Sometimes it's done in the pharmacy.

01:26 But you'll add a label to this to know what was added to the bag.

01:30 You follow this down.

01:31 Look, it's got the same type of drip chamber as we saw in our primary tubing.

01:35 You also want to keep this about halfway full so that you can see the drops come down.

01:40 Now look, you'll notice here we have a different kind of clamp.

01:43 This is a roller clamp.

01:45 Now, this clamp controls how much fluid and the rate.

01:49 So let's look at the primary tubing again.

01:51 Remember, this is longer.

01:53 This is the one that attaches right to the patient.

01:56 Now, we have it down in a container.

01:58 But if this was a real patient, it would be attached to their arm or wherever their IV site is.

02:02 So let's talk about this roller clamp.

02:04 This is the one that controls how fast the drops drip.

02:09 Okay, so you see the roller clamp is here.

02:11 Now, the idea is when it's rolled all the way down here, it's pinching off the tubing just like that slider clamp.

02:19 If I gently roll this back, it releases pressure until if I pull it all the way back here, then it's completely open.

02:28 So, this is completely closed, completely pinched off the tubing.

02:32 This one is completely open.

02:35 Now, what I want you to do is take a look at that drip chamber.

02:39 Okay, I'm going to move the roller clamp very close to the drip chamber.

02:42 So, you can see what happens as I move it.

02:45 All right, so here's your drip chamber. Here is your clamp.

02:49 Now, see it's completely off.

02:50 Now, look what happens as I move this roller clamp back up towards being open.

02:56 You see the rate gets faster, faster and now it's just completely wide open that we call it.

03:02 So let me close that roller clamp again.

03:05 All right, so get the concept with the roller clamp? I have no control with a slider clamp. It's on or it's off.

03:12 But with a roller clamp, it depends on how far I release the pressure as to how fast the drops will drip.

03:20 So, this is the point where you start to use your watch.

03:23 You need a second hand on your watch.

03:25 You'll watch the second hand as you count the drops in the drip chamber. Now remember what my goal is.

03:32 After the drug calculation that we did, calculating rate of milliliters per hour to drops per minute, I know that I need 20. So I'm going to start counting these.

03:41 I'm going to count them for 15 seconds.

03:44 I hope you enjoyed the practice videos we made for you.

03:48 Now, let's review one more time as we wrap up this video.

03:51 We have a primary solution.

03:53 That's a larger solution, 1000 milliliters.

03:56 This has a drip chamber and it has a port for entering medication if you need to.

04:01 It has the drip chamber. It has slide clamps and roller clamps.

04:06 This is secondary tubing. It's got an IV piggyback.

04:10 It has a drip chamber, a place where we could add medication if we needed to.

04:14 It's also got a roller clamp and a slide clamp.

04:18 Now, remember to adjust the rate once you do the calculations on how many drops you need a minute.

04:23 You use the roller clamp to adjust how fast these drops drip.

04:28 Now, in our practice question, remember it took 10 drops to make 1 milliliter.

04:34 So, if I'm looking for a rate of 20 drops a minute, I'm going to use the roller clamp to adjust how fast or how slow the drops drip.

04:43 I'm going to use a watch with a second hand to make sure that I count that.

04:48 Now, you don't have to count for a full 60 seconds.

04:51 Remember, you can count for 15 seconds and multiply it by 4, or 10 seconds and multiply it by 6 to know what you'll have for a minute.

04:59 Thank you for watching our video today.