Drawing More Than One Dose into a Syringe "Pulsing"

PLEASE NOTE: Posts made to this forum should not be considered as the expressed opinions of, nor should be considered endorsed by, the Medication Safety Officer’s Society (MSOS) or the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP).

Make sure your email is up-to-date
In order to continue to receive updates from MSOS, as well as forum posts and other valuable information as a member of MSOS, please be sure to update your email address with us, whenever it changes. If you need assistance doing so, please send an email to cmichalek@ismp.org.

1 post / 0 new

Thu, 08/28/2025 - 16:02

Terrence Davidson

Offline

Last seen: 14 hours 49 min ago

Joined: 12/05/2018 - 10:18

Drawing More Than One Dose into a Syringe "Pulsing"

We are reviewing the practice of drawing more than a single dose into a syringe. This has been discussed by ISMP over the years (February 2016 Volume 14 Issue 2) and is a future question in the IV push guidelines (Under what circumstances is it safe to draw up more than one dose or use a single syringe that contains more than
one dose of IV push medication for a single patient?). We have certain areas that maintain this practice (ie, drawing 2mg of hydromorphone into the syringe for 0.2mg IV push doses). We have been trying to reduce this practice but continue to get concerns about increased costs due to wastage, not enough resources for double checks, time concerns, etc. How are your sites working with this process? Do you allow it to occur and if so how do you improve safety around it? Any advice/feedback would be appreciated.
Regards,
Terrence Davidson
Medication Safety Pharmacist
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

Members Log In