Effectiveness of Normal Saline Flush versus Heparin Saline Flush in Maintaining the Patency of Peripheral Intravenous Cannula and on Occurrence of Intravenous Local Vascular Complications in Patients Receiving Intermittent Intravenous Medications

A study was conducted to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of normal saline flush versus Heparin saline flush (10 IU) in maintaining the patency of Peripheral intravenous cannula and on occurrence of intravenous local vascular complications in patients receiving intermittent intravenous (IV) medications. True experimental research approach with multiple treatments, pre-test post-test control group design was used. Purposive sampling technique was adopted; 90 patients who met the sampling criteria were assigned randomly to experimental group 1 (normal saline flush), experimental group 2 (heparin saline flush) and control group. Results showed that there was a significant association between patency of peripheral IV cannula and flushing. There was a significant association between Normal saline and Heparin saline group. There was a significant difference in mean IV local vascular complication score of all 3 groups with the highest mean score of control group. There was no significant difference between mean IV complication scores of normal saline and heparin saline group. The study revealed that flushing of IV cannula is very effective and normal saline and heparin saline flush (10 unit) are equally effective in maintaining the patency of peripheral IV cannula and preventing the occurrence of local vascular complications.