Clinical Skills - Mixing Insulin

Hi. I'm Ellis with Level Up RN. In this video, I'll be demonstrating how to mix insulin in one syringe. I'll be following the steps on our cards in our Clinical Nursing Skills deck. So if you've got this deck, grab this card, and you can follow along with me. If you don't have the deck, you can head on over to leveluprn.com to check it out.

I'm going to try my best to do this demonstration without getting tongue-tied. But I'll admit, it gets a little tricky. So when I'm drawing up insulin, I want to draw up my clear insulin before I draw up my cloudy insulin. So it feels a little bit backwards to make sure that I put my air into the cloudy insulin before I put air into my clear insulin. So let's go ahead and do all the steps together. So the first thing I'm going to do is just pop off my caps. And because these are new vials, I don't need to clean the caps. I'm going to take the lid off my insulin needle.

And we're going to say that I'm going to do 5 of each type of insulin. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to pull my plunger back to 5. So get 5 units of air in my syringe. I'm then going to insert 5 units of air into my cloudy vial. Next, I'm going to pull up 5 units of air again, and I'm going to insert 5 units of air into my clear vial. Then without taking the needle out, I'm going to invert my syringe and my vial, and I'm going to withdraw the plunger to that 5 units. All right. So I've got my 5 units of clear insulin. Now I need my 5 units of cloudy insulin. So I'm going to insert my needle, invert my vial, and this time, I, of course, will pull my plunger back to the number 10 as I'm drawing the additional 5 units. And now I have clear and cloudy insulin in my syringe that I can administer to my patient.