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Question

Your physician has ordered 2000 units of a medication to be administered to your patient. You have 8000 units on hand. What is the correct dose that should be administered to your patient?

Answer 1

Hello Amanda,

This question has been oversimplified thus made to be more difficult than it needs to be. Medications are measured either by weight (usually in milligrams or mg) or by volume (usually milliliters or mL). Let's assume this is a liquid/injectable medication. If you have an 8,000 unit/mL vial and you need to provide 2,000 units, it would seem reasonable to use 2,000 units of the total 8,000 units and discard the remaining 6,000 units, right? Thus, you would need to determine the amount of liquid you would need to remove from the vial to only use 2,000 units. To accomplish this, set up a ratio of how much you want to use (2,000 units) divided by the total number of units available (8,000). 2,000/8,000 = 1/4 or 0.25. Thus you would need to use one quarter of the 8,000 unit/mL vial. In the real word, you would be using 0.25 mL of liquid, but the answer to the question asked is 1/4 of the 8,000 units available.