Intravenous Infusion Pumps

Medication error: infusion pump

Billions of dollars are spent on health care that never directly
affect patient care. Smart pumps, however can improve patient safety
by reducing medication administration errors (Harding, 2013). An
intravenous smart pump helps nurses regulate the correct rate and line
of infusion. Infusing an Intravenous solution without a pump its like a
time bomb waiting to explode. Before Intravenous pump was not
introduced, many catastrophic errors had happened which puts
patients safety in jeopardy. For instants, a patient is suppose received
heparin drip at 800 units per hour and normal saline at 75ml per hour.
They were both hung at the same time but during the infusion setup
the nurse accidentally set the wrong flow rate for the infusion. She set
the flow rate for normal saline to infuse using the heparin drip rate and
heparin drip rate at normal salines flow rate (Paparella, Wollitz
&Horsham, 2014). Mistakes like this happens on daily basis before the
intravenous pumps was implemented. The patient that was suppose to
get his 800 units of heparin per hour ended up getting more than he
should, sometimes little mistakes happens but in this case the
consequences is deadly. The patient is getting heparin as a blood
thinner to thin their blood but with increase dosage of heparin it could
cause the patient to bleed out and death if the situation was not
resolved in timely manner. If the infusion was run on a pump the line

would be organized and programed into the pump, there would be no

chance of setting up the wrong rate for the wrong infusion. Infusion
pumps makes mistakes less likely to happen but its still up to the nurse
to always check what they have on hand and compare with what they
are infusing.
In another case the patients systolic pressure started dropping
and IV nor-epinephrine was ordered to maintained systolic blood
pressure over 90 mm Hg, not long after the infusion was started the
patients systolic blood pressure drop to 68/30. The nurse then
realized that the line was not even connected when she was ordered to
increase the dosage of nor-epinephrine (Paparella, Wollitz& Horsham,
2014). If a smart pump was implemented in place and a line was
blocked off, the infusion pump will simply start beeping letting the
nurse know that something is going on with the line or something is
wrong with the infusion. Instead of coming back at the end of the shift
only to find your patients line not running and not medication was not
getting deliver properly to the patient. Intravenous Pumps works along
the side of nurses and patients, it boost confident of the patient that
they are getting the correct infusion rate they need and also reduce
human errors. It acts as a last line of defense before the IV is being
infused into the patient.

Even though intravenous pump significantly decreases

medication errors but there are currently few limitation to how much
the intravenous pump can do. For example, the intravenous pump
cannot operate without human commands unless the dosage is out of
therapeutic range. The IV pump cannot verified patient identity itself
but some offers a bar code identification through the MAR. lastly IV
pump cannot assess patient in case of phlebitis , infiltration or
extravasation ( Harding, 2013).