hey everyone it's sarah with registerednessrn.com and in this video i'm going to be solving some iv flow rate dosage calculations specifically solving for hourly rate milliliters per hour and whenever you get done watching this video you can access a free quiz that will give you some more practice questions so let's get started now to help me solve these problems i am going to be using a formula and the great thing about solving dosage calculations is that you can use various methods it really depends on what method you like and whatever your program's requiring you to use to solve these problems so in my previous videos i used dimensional analysis to help me solve for the hourly rate but today i'm going to concentrate on using this formula so what does this formula say well it says that whenever we plug in this information we will be able to have our hourly rate milliliters per hour how many milliliters that patient should be receiving every hour so how do we get that well the top part of your formula is the milliliters part this is where you're going to plug that in and this is the total amount that is ordered for your patient the total volume amount then that's over the total hours that it needs to be infused over so you will put that in divide that and then you get milliliters per hour so let's take a look at this problem our order says that the physician wants the patient to receive 500 milliliters over eight hours we need to solve for how many milliliters per hour the patient should be receiving so how many milliliters does a patient need to be infused with over eight hours in order to equal this total volume of 500 milliliters well let's plug it into our formula so the first part is our total volume the patient needs to receive that's going to be 500 and that's going to be divided into the hours they need to receive this over an eight hour period so that's going to be over eight so just divide 500 divided by eight equals 62.5 now with these calculations we round to the nearest whole number so since 62.5 we will round to 63. so 63 milliliters per hour is what the patient needs to receive in order to equal what the position ordered now let's look at this problem it says that the physician has ordered the patient to receive 2 liters to be infused over 12 hours and we need to solve for the hourly rate the milliliters per hour so with our formula it's milliliters over hours we divide that and we get our answer but look at this problem our total amount volume amount is in liters so we've got to do a little converting so remember from the metric table that one liter is equal to a thousand milliliters so whenever you say a thousand times two you get two thousand so two liters is equivalent to two thousand milliliters so that's what we're going to put in on the top part of our formula so we're going to put 2 000 and it needs to infuse over 12 hours this is where our time goes so over 12 and we're going to divide that so 2000 divided by 12 that gives us 166.66 repeating and we're going to round to the nearest whole number and that gives us 167 milliliters per hour and that is our hourly rate but now let's look at this problem and let's say that it's asking for you to solve for the total volume instead of the hourly rate so the problem says that the physician wants a patient to have an infusion to run at 167 milliliters per hour for 12 hours and then you'll stop the infusion so what's the total volume that's going to be given so how would you solve for that well what you would do with this one is that instead of dividing you're going to just multiply so you would take your volume that you need to give every hour which is 167 and you would just multiply it by 12. so you would say 167 times 12 because i need to get that every hour for 12 hours and whenever you do that you get 2004 milliliters that is the total volume that the patient will be receiving at this hourly rate now let's take a look at this problem it says that the physician wants us to infuse one liter over six hours and it says that we have a drop factor of 15 drops per milliliter and we need to solve for an hourly rate how many milliliters per hour should the patient be receiving and we have to take it a step further and figure out how many drops per minute the patient should be receiving so if you already noticed this problem it's a little bit different than those other ones because we're having to solve for the drops per minute and the reason i wanted to throw this type of problem in for you is because whenever you're solving these iv flow rates they're also going to ask along with this hourly rate the drops per minute so you want to be familiar with these drop factors and i have a whole video where i go into detail about this and how to set up the formula and to solve it so after you watch this if you need more practice and more explanation on this topic you can check out that video so the first thing let's go ahead and let's solve for this hourly rate right here okay here's our formula and we have to give one liter so we need to put that into milliliters and we know from the metric table that one liter equals a thousand milliliters so there we go we have our answer it's a thousand so put in a thousand up here and physician once again over six hours so we're gonna put six down here and we're just going to divide so a thousand divided by six is 166.66 repeating and we're going to round to our nearest whole number so 167 milliliters per hour is our hourly rate that's what that needs to go in at now let's solve for the drops per minute so in order to do that we need to be familiar with our drop factor so what in the world is a drop factor and where does this come from well this information comes from the iv tubing package it will tell you on it what the drop factor is for this particular tubing and a drop factor is the number of drops it takes in order to create one milliliter of solution that you're giving so with this particular tubing that we have it says that for every 15 drops it's creating it's making one milliliter of solution so in order to solve for drops per minute there's another formula that you want to memorize to help you with them and this is what it looks like so i'm just going to put this there so it says that for the total volume that you're giving so the milliliters will be here you're going to divide that into the time but the time is going to be minutes so minutes will be here and normally your problem will give it to you in hours so it'll be like hours times 60 minutes and that will give you the amount of minutes because in one hour there's 60 minutes so we would multiply to get the amount of minutes and then we're going to take that and we're going to multiply that by the drip the drop factor so by the drop factor and this is going to equal the drops per minute and we have our answer so let's apply that formula to this problem so you can see okay let me erase this give us a little bit more room okay milliliters so we are going to be giving one liter of fluid and we figured out that one liter equals a thousand milliliters so a thousand milliliters and we are giving it over six hours so six times 60 will give us the minutes because we have six hours times 60 minutes whenever we do that that will give us 360. minutes so that is the time and we're going to multiply that by the drop factor which is 15. so whenever you divide a thousand by 360 you get 2.777 repeating and then we multiply that by 15 and when you multiply that out you get 41.66 repeating and we'll round to the nearest whole number so that will give us 42 drops per minute and that is our answer now you may be wondering whenever i work that problem solving for the drops per minute can we have just plugged in instead of this information with the one liter over six hours couldn't we just have plugged in the hourly rate that we saw for previously which again was 167 milliliters per hour and absolutely you could have so instead of putting one liter which would have been thousand milliliters over six hours you could have did it this way with this formula you could have put in 167 because that's how many milliliters they should be received every hour and that's going to be over the minutes so it says that every 60 minutes because one hour has 60 minutes in it they're going to be receiving 167 mls so we would put it over 60. and then you're going to multiply it by its drop factor which is 15. so whenever you divide 167 by 60 you get 2.7833 repeating and then you multiply that by 15 and whenever you do that you get 41.75 and again when you round to the whole number you get 42 drops per minute as your answer so you got the same exact answer by just plugging in that information as well okay so that wraps up this video on how to solve for the hourly flow rate and if you'd like to watch more videos in this series you can access the link in the youtube description below