Intravenous Infiltration
Information on Intravenous Infiltration
Intravenous (IV) infiltration is a serious problem associated with infusion therapy.
IV infiltration is usually accompanied by pain, erythema, and swelling at the needle insertion site.
Severe infiltration may lead to necrosis (image on right) or even death. Necrosis could
require skin debridement, skin grafting, and/or amputation. One of the current methods of detecting IV infiltration is
nurses observing pain and discomfort from a patient verbally or observationally.
IV infiltration happens more often in children, because they can not communicate pain as easily to the nurses (or not at all),
and it is also much harder for the nurses to detect infiltration observationally for them.
Statistics Involving Intravenous Infiltration
150 million IVs are required for 80% of the 40 million annual
hospital patients in the U.S. Three percent of these IVs result in infiltration (over 4 million)
which can lead to extreme physical and financial problems for many patients.
