¹Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Universitas Islam Indonesia, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
²School of Pharmacy, Worlverhampton University, Wolverhampton WV1 1NA, United Kingdom
³School of Biomedical Sciences, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, NSW, Australia DOI : 10.29228/jrp.339 Simultaneous delivery of incompatible IV medications may produce a very large amount of precipitation as a result of incompatibility. This study aims to evaluate the influence of flushing to reduce precipitation. To study the effect of flushing, we examined flushing with various volumes before and after injection of drug combinations which resulted in incompatibility. A series of infusion and injection drug were delivered using “a typical patient model”. Flushing of pre-and post-drug delivery was administered for each of the incompatible drug combination. The influence of the different flushing volumes was analyzed qualitatively by comparing the particle images of each sample. The benefits of flushing was analysed from the precipitation images in the samples compared to the sample control. Amongst five co-infusion groups and one co-injections administrations, two mililiters flushing was effective for the prevention of incompatibility in co-infusion A with acyclovir; coinfusion B with meropenem; co-infusion C with chloramphenicol; and co-infusion D with cefotaxime. However, phenytoin precipitation with co-infusion C could not be avoided even though a higher volume (up to 5 mL of flushing) was used. A flushing of 1.5 mL pre and a 2 mL postdrug delivery effectively reduce the precipitation of drug incompatibilities except for the phenytoin. Keywords : Intravenous; incompatibility prevention; flushing