Perhaps the term piggy back might mean different things to different people. To me piggyback drips are running as a secondary while your primary fluid using the differential gravitational force to drive the secondary fluid in lieu of the primary fluid. I guess you could mess the with the secondary clamp but I would personally rather just string up a second line with your chaser. If you change the gravity on your bags at all it can change the differential rate which gravity pushes in your primary and secondary on your piggyback.
In the world of critical care we almost never use piggyback as a way of delivering any medicaitons (with the exception of as a flush for chemo, antibiotics, etc...). Rather medications that are necessitate a strict rate are given on a independent primary drip set.
Without a chaser any changes to drip rate are going to be delayed by whatever the priming volume is on the set. If you are in theory only running one drug through a site that isn't a problem, but if you are running more than one drug you start to end up with some weirdness between wherever your meds Y-site and the actual infusion site, in some cases this can be several mLs. Even a priming volume of 0.5 mL with a drip rate of 0.33 mL/hr ends up being over an hour before the change may reach the patient. The chaser fluid helps to mitigate this by over all increasing the infusion rate without increasing the amount of drug given so that any changes are quicker in effect.
In the world of critical care we almost never use piggyback as a way of delivering any medicaitons (with the exception of as a flush for chemo, antibiotics, etc...). Rather medications that are necessitate a strict rate are given on a independent primary drip set.
Without a chaser any changes to drip rate are going to be delayed by whatever the priming volume is on the set. If you are in theory only running one drug through a site that isn't a problem, but if you are running more than one drug you start to end up with some weirdness between wherever your meds Y-site and the actual infusion site, in some cases this can be several mLs. Even a priming volume of 0.5 mL with a drip rate of 0.33 mL/hr ends up being over an hour before the change may reach the patient. The chaser fluid helps to mitigate this by over all increasing the infusion rate without increasing the amount of drug given so that any changes are quicker in effect.
