National Shortage of Normal Saline

AllNurses.com ^ | Jan 9, 2014 | MadWife2002

[bkopto]

How is this shortage of Normal Saline going to affect your facilities?

I hear that Baxter may have production levels back to normal on the 17th January? This has the potential to be detrimental to our dialysis patients.

Fresenius are also experiencing a shortage of saline

Are your facilities making back up plans?

I hear that hospitals will be affected too!

Some of the units I work with use a vast amount of Normal saline per day

What I want to know is how are these 'drugs' in short supply?

Normal Saline, seriously how can this happen!

[exDemMom]

FYI, there have been various prescription drug shortages for (IIRC) a few years now. It looks to me like the shortages are expanding to include more common items now.

Don’t we just love when government steps into the business of trying to control supply and demand? < /sarc >

[reformedliberal]

All good points. I did question if it could be used IV, but was posting quickly before we left for the evening.

It just is incomprehensible that we do not have domestic producers (plural) of something so commonly used.

[BushCountry]

Wasn’t a 100% serious, but coconut water I think was used also in Vietnam in a pinch. Below is excerpt about its use:

Coconut water can be used for a variety of medical purposes, one of which is intravenous re-hydration. A 2000 report tells of a stroke patient in the Solomon Islands who was too ill to drink or use a nasal tube but was successfully re-hydrated with a coconut-water IV when no other fluids were available. Emergency coconut IVs were reportedly used by the British and Japanese during World War II, and they’ve been clinically tested on humans several times to see how well they’d be tolerated. Answer: overall, pretty well.

[TheWeepingProphetJ]

Coconut water is an isotonic solution (very important) and could be used in emergency in the field when away from other sources of iv fluid.