How to calculate IV fluid

The history of the intravenous therapy is less than a century old. Yet, it is well known that medication could be injected directly into the vein as early as the 1600’s, because of the lack of scientific methods, original attempts to deliver IV fluids and drugs met with little success. Two world wars brought in the era of modern IV therapy. However, the greatest advance in drugs, equipment, and procedures has occurred in the past 25 years. The first intravenous injections were experimented with in 1642 by a gentleman’s hunting servant in eastern Germany. Similar experiments were done in 1655 by Christopher Wren in Oxford England and a group of scientists around the physicist Robert Boyle. These experiments were prompted by new knowledge about blood circulation provided by William Harvey in 1628, because of lethal accidents the infusions soon fell from favor.
So, let us hop into the 21st century and imagine that you have been working outside in the heat all day and you feel very dehydrated and need to be rushed to the hospital. Well, step into the world of a nurse and learn how to do this difficult task. First, the calibration of the drip is necessary, the volume is necessary, and how many minutes are necessary in what you are trying to find. You, the patient, are getting a certain amount of saline solution through the IV tubing. There will be 50cc IVPB, (Intravenous-Piggy-Back) which is a small volume parental solution for intermittent infusion at the same time, over 30 minutes using IV tubing with a calibration of 10. There would be 20 drops per minute.

Select “x = minutes”
X= 30
Volume= 50
Calibration= 10
50X/ 10-30 = 16.7 or 17 gtt/min or drops/min

The drip rate is the number of drops per minute to be infused. The drip factor of the tubing is found on the manufacturer’s packing. If the problem states micro drops, then the drip factor of the tubing is 60 gtt/ml.

The formula is: Total number