Thought I would share our current Omnipaque Strategy:
Hospital pharmacy takes a 50 ml vial and divides it into 25 2 ml doses in separate syringes. This is done under their hood (they already do this with certain specialty meds)
These doses are packaged, dated together in a dated bag, and refrigerated for a 10 day life span
when my day surgery team tees things up they pull one dose per pt that a.m.. If I need more than 2ml they can borrow from a later case and grab a replacement from the fridge for that later case to warm up
Upon starting a case my assistant squirts the Omnipaque in a sterile well on my tray and I draw from that. I initially tried directly drawing from the syringe by putting an 18G inside the tip of the syringe but that did not work very well I assume due to the viscosity and small volume. I also tried using a filter straw to draw up from the well which also did not work well (I was avoiding using a needle as the well is thin plastic and I did not want to puncture it. So know I just suck it up with the syringe tip w/o a needle or straw and it works well
Most cases I am using < 2 ml anyway
That is what we are doing for now, so we can get 25 cases from one vial
Hospital pharmacy takes a 50 ml vial and divides it into 25 2 ml doses in separate syringes. This is done under their hood (they already do this with certain specialty meds)
These doses are packaged, dated together in a dated bag, and refrigerated for a 10 day life span
when my day surgery team tees things up they pull one dose per pt that a.m.. If I need more than 2ml they can borrow from a later case and grab a replacement from the fridge for that later case to warm up
Upon starting a case my assistant squirts the Omnipaque in a sterile well on my tray and I draw from that. I initially tried directly drawing from the syringe by putting an 18G inside the tip of the syringe but that did not work very well I assume due to the viscosity and small volume. I also tried using a filter straw to draw up from the well which also did not work well (I was avoiding using a needle as the well is thin plastic and I did not want to puncture it. So know I just suck it up with the syringe tip w/o a needle or straw and it works well
Most cases I am using < 2 ml anyway
That is what we are doing for now, so we can get 25 cases from one vial