Why not? The dos and don’ts of fluid therapy

Fluids are one of the most common medications we give to our patients; however when prescribing these we do not always think about the consequences they can have on our patients' balance, especially when it can be so labile such as in disease conditions. Fluid can be life-saving, for example when dealing with hypovolemic and severely dehydrated patients, and under-dosing can have a significant impact on patients' outcome. We will discuss early recognition of shock and volume-responsiveness and describe how to assess the response to treatment in our patients in practice and optimise our resuscitation strategy. On the other side we will also discuss how to avoid over-dosing of fluid therapy in our patients and volume overload which can have a deleterious impact, especially in our cardiac and renal patients.

• Understand how to detect shock and assess for presence hypovolemia and discuss resuscitation strategies
• Describe how to elaborate an appropriate fluid therapy plan for our hospitalised patients
• Discuss the challenges of fluid therapy in the emergency and critical patients