Medicine issued by hospital

[MarjorieWinklepicker]

Ds is 5 and had a tonsillectomy, adenoidectomy and grommets inserted on Tuesday.

He seems to be doing okay so far as I'm keeping him topped up with medicine.

But just noticed on the bottle of paracetamol he has it says not to give to children under the age of 6? His dose is 325mg every 6 hours, is that about right? He has ibuprofen and morphine too.

the hospital calculates doses by weight, not by age. dose sounds fine to me.

How heavy is he? Its 15mg per kg, so if hes over 21kg, then thats fine. It's still every 6 hours, and you can take Ibuprofen and morphine with paracetamol all together, no problem.

When my dd was small she used to hate medicine and refuse it. So ifshewasvery ill and needed it, i would give the calpol for older children as a far smaller quantity had the correct amount of paracetamol in as it's stronger.

He is just over 18kg. And not particularly big for a 5 year old, one of the smallest in his class actually mainly because he hasn't been able to eat very well.

And the nurse did say it was done by weight, but I also calculated he had to be over 21kg for that dose.

Just thought I would double check because it wouldn't surprise me if they got something wrong. Whilst in hospital the student nurse hasn't recorded that she had given him paracetamol and ibruprofen at 6.30am, the staff nurse came to give him more at 8am. And his discharge notes have completely the wrong operation on them.

If he is 18kg I (paeds nurse) would normally be giving 5.4ml of the 6+ paracetamol (270mg). He shouldn't be having any more than 75mg/kg/day (absolute max daily dose), which works out as 1350mg over a 24hour period, which if you divide into 4 doses 6 hours apart would be 337.5mg - I imagine this is what your hospital calculated and then rounded down to a practical to measure out volume. So according the the maximum safe doses, the amount he's been having is safe for the weight you say he is, they've just worked it out so he's getting the absolute most he can have.

I would be more concerned that the student nurse was giving out meds and not signing them, as a student should be getting all medications checked and counter signed by a registered nurse, so can't see how it wasn't documented.

Thank you for working that out for me!

Well the nurse always had this electronic pad when she was giving out medicine, the student nurse just came in with the syringes and gave them to me to give to him. Then around an hour and a half later (after shift change at 8am) a new nurse came to give him more because it said his last dose was at 2am and not 6.30am like it actually was.