Welcome to Helix Talk, an educational podcast for healthcare students and providers covering real-life clinical pearls, professional pharmacy topics, and drug therapy discussions.

This podcast is provided by pharmacists and faculty members at Rosal Franklin University College of Pharmacy.

This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not professional

advice and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified health care provider.

And now on to the show. Welcome to Helix Talk episode 113. I'm your co-host Dr. Kane.

And I'm Dr. Patel. And today's title is the top 10 clinical

pearls for total perentral nutrition or TPN. So today we're going through not a comprehensive

review of TPN and giving IV nutrition to patients, but kind of the top 10 pearls that are kind of

our subjective, what we think are key elements that every pharmacist

really should know about TPN administration and dosing and things like that. And this was actually

one of our listener requested subject. So we thank you for that request. And I'm actually really

excited to learn or refresh my memory because this is not the practice setting that I, you know, encounter TPNs on a regular basis. So with that, let's get started.

Yeah. So pearl number one is going to be if the gut works, use it. And really knowing about TPN

is important, but knowing when to not use TPN is also really important. So basically,

patients are indicated for TPN if they are malnourished and we think that they're

going to be NPO for a while, or if they are not malnourished, we literally wait seven days

before we would initiate TPN for a patient.

And that's really important that if someone comes in who's not malnourished and we know

that we're not going to be able to feed them, we will literally wait seven days before starting that TPN and that

patient. And that sounds like a really long time, but they're getting IV hydration and things like

that. They're just not getting protein, fats, and dextrose and IV formulation for that

first seven days. So it may sound extreme that while you're kind of quote unquote starving them for seven days,

...