It’s not uncommon for our pharmacy to unit-dose liquid medications from a bulk bottle; 5mL Donnatal oral syringes, 20mL SMX/TMP and 15mL chlorhexidine unit-dosed cups, etc. Pulling up oral syringes and filling unit-dose medication cups is a manual and time consuming process.
During my years at Children’s Hospital Central California the technicians would use a Baxa Repeater Pump with tubing hanging out of a large conical cylinder to fill oral syringes with acetaminophen and ibuprofen for the emergency department. It was a great impromptu system that was used to fill thousands of oral syringes.
It turns out that there are a couple of commercially available packaging solutions for oral liquids. The Fluidose Series 5 by Medical Packaging Inc is one of those systems.
According to the Medical Packaging Inc website: “The Fluidoseâ„¢ Series 5 Unit Dose Packaging System is MPI’s next generation automated, bar coding packaging solution for unit dose oral liquids. This solution can decrease packaging costs, increase operational efficiency and reduce medication errors and is available with two filling options, either the Syringe Pump or optional Baxa® pump. [The Fluidose system] produces up to 15 doses per minute depending on fill rate [and is] available in three different sizes (15ml, 25ml, and 35ml); in-stock in blue and red to assist in color coding of controlled medications.â€
If you ever find yourself unit-dosing a lot of bulk oral liquids, then it might be worth a look.
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