Introduction to Intravenous (IV) Bag Preparation (Nursing)

00:00 Welcome to the skill Intravenous Therapy Preparation. So in this particular skill, I'm going to talk to you about how to hang primary maintenance or continuous fluids. So I am talking about the same thing. So you may hear this lingo and we're all talking about the same thing about continuous fluid administration. So again, you may hear primary, maintenance, or continuous IV fluids. Those are typically going to be something like normal saline for example or Lactated Ringers. So before we get too far into the skill, I want to take a moment to talk about the solution itself. So, most of the time when you hang IV primary fluids, for example, or continuous fluids, it's going to be in a plastic bag that you're going to receive from your pharmacy. So occasionally though, you will see IV solution in a glass bottle. This may seem kind of weird to you, but the reason why we do this is some medication can be absorbed through that plastic bag and we do not want that for effectiveness. Nitroglycerins are really great example of this. So you may see nitroglycerin in a glass bottle because we don't want that med absorbing into the plastic bag. So just to recap that point, you may see IV solution in a plastic IV bag or a glass bottle. So let's take a look at the equipment we're going to need. We're going to need the solution itself. We need IV administration tubing. So it's important here to make sure you get the right tubing, we call it primary tubing. You want your IV pole, alcohol swabs, and also a tubing label. So each facility is a little bit different, but these labels are really handy to connect to the tubing. We use this so we know how long has that tubing been hanging. Most agencies say about 72 hours but check your facility policy. Now, I want you to take a look here. If we use that glass bottle IV solution like we had talked about, we made a need to use a special kind of primary tubing. It's called vented tubing. So why do glass bottles uses vented tubing? So vented tubing contains a small little air inlet on the spike that you see here. This is really important to allow air to enter into the IV bottle and let the fluid itself infuse. So one take away is if you see a glass bottle, you probably need vented tubing for glass bottle administration. If you're getting a normal plastic IV solution like in a normal plastic bag, you should not need vented tubing.