New Guidance Published: Vascular Access Device Flushing and Locking for Paediatric Patients
We are pleased to announce the release of new national guidance on Vascular Access Device Flushing and Locking for Paediatric Patients, now available on the NIVAS website. This guidance has been developed collaboratively by a multidisciplinary team of experts, including pharmacists, nurses, and paediatric medication safety officers and NIVAS, to address safety risks and variations in practice. It aims to standardise care and provide evidence-based recommendations to improve outcomes for children and young people.
Key highlights of the guidance include:
This document is intended to be a resource for healthcare professionals working with paediatric patients and aligns with national safety priorities to ensure the highest standards of care.
Access the guidance here: www.nivas.org.uk
For further information or feedback, please contact Ashifa Trivedi (Editor) at ashifa.trivedi@nhs.net or Andrew Barton (Sub-Editor/Contributor) at andrew.barton@nhs.net.
Please follow this link to download the NIVAS infiltration and extravasation toolkit. This toolkit is intended to enable local services and healthcare organisations to implement polices, protocols and guidelines that will increase awareness about non-chemotherapy extravasations. The toolkit is a guide to help improve patient safety in IV therapy practice. There will a series of webinars in the coming months about the extravasations toolkit and how to implement it in your local organisation. There are also downloadable action cards and campaign posters to raise awareness about infiltration and extravasation which can be found here.
Please contact me for further information by email on andrew.barton@nhs.net
Andrew Barton, NIVAS Chair
Dear NIVAS Member,
I hope this message finds you and your services recovering well from the pandemic. I wanted to update you about some of the recent work NIVAS has been doing.
Before the pandemic NIVAS we starting to work on national guidelines for vascular access and IV therapy and the creation of a nationally accredited qualification for vascular access. I am very pleased to tell you the board has started working on these projects in earnest. We have completely mapped out the national guidelines and started to populate the data and evidence needed to produce these. These guidelines will form the basis of the content for the national vascular access qualification. This forms a 3 year plan to improve safety nationally in relation to IV therapy and vascular access practice.
NIVAS is still working hard to promote your interests nationally in relation to IV therapy and vascular access practice and will continue to do so. As you will know, procuring IV therapy and vascular access products has been a problem over the past few months with the most commonly used devices not being available via NHS supply chain. This shortage or devices such as cannula, venepuncture sets and 10ml saline ampules have made good practice in IV therapy and vascular access harder to maintain but not impossible thankfully. A couple of things to remember is that not all needle free connectors are Aurum glass syringe prefilled emergency drug compatible, NIVAS is still working with MHRA and NHS I/E. It important to be aware of issues like this because if your usually needle free connector becomes unavailable, care should be taken to replace it with a like for like product.
Take care everyone.
Kind Regards
Andrew Barton, NIVAS Chair
