 mixing nebs
Something interesting I learned from the RTs at my local hospital -- mixing nebules apparently is double plus bad! From what I understand, like 98% of all the medications that come in the nebules (respules, sterinebs, whatever) contain preservatives, unless they're specifically marked preservative free. As much as we may know that some drugs just don't mix (like how atrovent isn't a good thing to mix with other drugs) we don't know exactly which preservatives are in these nebules! The situation that she presented to me was this: that once the nebules are mixed in the nebulizer, the preservatives could either counteract or interact, meaning they could cause a reaction where they increase the effect of the medications or cause them not to work.
Apparently the best way to go about mixing medications together if you Absolutely Have To (and she stressed it shouldn't be done at all in the first place but it's done all the time anyway) is to keep consistent with the brands -- like mixing two sterinebs from the same company might not cause as many problems as just throwing whatever inside the nebulizer.
This makes a lot of sense to me -- anybody else's comments?
I know it saves so much more time, but still...
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