Hi, this is Cathy with Level Up RN. In this video I will be going over key information about insulin syringes. I will also be talking about mixing insulins and go over an example problem that involves mixing insulins. You can find all the information that I'll be covering in this video in our Level Up RN dosage calculation workbook. If you are in nursing school, then you know how important it is to master dosage calculations, and our workbook will help you do just that. In a nutshell, our workbook contains all different types of dosage calculation problems that you are likely to encounter in nursing school. And we demonstrate how to solve each problem using multiple methods, so you can pick the way that makes the most sense to you.
When you are administering insulin to your patient, you need to use a special insulin syringe. We are not going to use syringes that come in milliliters. We're going to use insulin syringes that come in units. So there are several different sizes of insulin syringes. Common sizes include 30 units, 50 units, and 100 units. So it's going to be important for you to pay close attention to the markings on the syringe because for some insulin syringes, each marking will be equal to one unit. So for example, here we have 5 units, 6 units, 7 units, 8 units, 9 units, 10 units. However, some insulin syringes, like this one at the bottom, which is 100 units, each little marking equals 2 units. So here we have 20 units, 22 units, 24, 26, 28, and 30. So you definitely need to pay close attention to your syringe markings and make sure you are using an insulin syringe to administer your insulin and not any other type of syringe.
As a practicing nurse, it is unlikely that you will have to mix insulins. However, in nursing school you definitely have to know which insulins can be mixed and which ones can't and the steps involved in mixing insulin. So you can mix an intermediate-acting insulin, such as NPH, with a shorter-acting insulin, such as regular insulin. You cannot mix long-acting insulins, such as insulin glargine, with any other insulins. In terms of the steps involved with mixing insulins, I'm going to go through those now, definitely important to know. So you want to start by injecting air into your longer-acting or cloudy insulin, such as NPH. So you're going to inject air into that one, remove the needle, and inject air into your clear, shorter-acting insulin, such as regular insulin. Then without removing the needle you're going to invert the vial, draw up the insulin, the short-acting insulin, and then go over and draw up your longer-acting insulin, which is your cloudy insulin, such as NPH. So those are the steps. You always want to draw up your clear before your cloudy. And our little trick to help you remember, what comes first is you want to be an RN. So you want to draw up your regular insulin before your NPH insulin.
Okay, so let's take a look at this example here at the bottom. This says to draw up 12 units of regular insulin with 26 units of NPH insulin, and it's asking us to fill in the syringe below with the correct dose of each insulin, identifying where one insulin stops and where the other one starts, and what is the total number of units being drawn for this injection. So obviously, insulin is not this color. So this is just-- we made it kind of bright so you can kind of see the difference in amounts between regular and NPH insulin. In addition, when you draw up two different kinds of insulin in a syringe, they're not going to stay separated like this either. They're going to mix together. But in this example, we were asked to draw up 12 units of regular insulin and 26 units of NPH insulin, which means that we are going to be administering a total of 38 units of insulin. And again, we would draw up that regular insulin first before the NPH insulin.
