Blogs

I too work in an acute care setting. We used to lock our catheters with 5,000units/ml and then decreased that to 1,000units/ml heparin without incidence. Now, however, we lock our catheters with normal saline as we no longer use dead end caps, but Tego caps instead. The Tego caps are neutral pressure and decrease the risk of blood backflow into the catheter when used properly. A few of the chronic settings also use these caps and lock with normal saline.

Helllo Jill and Leigh,
I work also in an acute care setting and we use heparin1000units/ml per fill volume of the catheter. However for patient's who have allergies to heparin or are tested for + heparin induced thrombocytopenia we pack the catheters with 10cc 0.9 NS only.

Jill,
I also work in the acute and chronic dialysis setting. We previously used heparin 5000 unit/ml and we switched to 1000 unit /ml without any problem. Now we do have a few patients who have no other chance of an access except the permanat catheter, so we we have very successfully used TPA to keep those catheters functioning as often as after every treatment .