Differentiating between opioid premixed IV bags

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Mon, 06/07/2021 - 19:06
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Yixin Tan
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Joined: 03/14/2019 - 02:32
Differentiating between opioid premixed IV bags

Hi all,

I'm a medication safety pharmacist in New Zealand and we have opioid premixed IV bags that we use in patient controlled analgesia and produced by the same company. Due to international colour coding standards that require that colour use for IV opioid products is limited to light blue, we have a situation where our morphine, oxycodone, and fentanyl premixed IV bags look very similar at a glance. We have had several incidents of selection error.

We will be going back to the manufacturer to explore some possible improvements to make the bags more easily differentiated, but thought I'd ask this forum if anyone has a similar issue and what improvements have been explored/are effective. To provide context, we have pyxis medstations but available space is limited storage of these bags differs between clinical areas.

Many thanks in advance!

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