IV bag shortage leaves hospitals scrambling

Puerto Rico hurricane crippled key factories

TRENTON, N.J. — An ongoing shortage of fluids used to deliver medicine and treat dehydrated patients has hospital workers scrambling in the midst of a nasty flu season and supplies from factories in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico have been slow to rebound.

Supplies of saline and nutrient solutions were tight before hurricanes pounded Puerto Rico and cut power to manufacturing plants that make much of the U.S. supply of fluid-filled bags used to deliver sterile solutions to patients.

Flu season has turned out to be a bad one and it came early, bringing patients in need of fluids into hospitals already running low.

Hospital officials, pharmacists and other staff have been devising alternatives and workarounds, training doctors and nurses on new procedures and options and hitting the phones to try to secure fluids from secondary suppliers.

“If we can’t support patients coming in emergency rooms who have the flu, more people are going to die,” predicts Deborah Pasko, director of medication safety and quality at the American Society of Health System Pharmacists. “I see it as a crisis.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration stressed “the production situation in Puerto Rico remains fragile.”

Puerto Rico’s power grid is being slowly restored, and the last of three Baxter International factories there that make saline bags and nutrient solutions was reconnected just before Christmas. But power outages are still slowing Baxter’s efforts.

Only a few other companies make those solutions, and supplies never fully recovered after a 2014 shortage of saline bags.

Now many hospitals are only getting half or two-thirds of what they order and have only a few days’ worth of saline on their shelves.