Heparin question
I work in ED. There is a nurse on my unit who is obsessed with talking about how you can’t stop heparin for any reason. At least once a shift she brings it up. Now, we are pretty lucky in that we don’t typically have to board patients. So we don’t keep heparin gtts that long before they go to their next destination. But at other jobs I’ve sometimes had them for at least the first coag draw. I’ve been a nurse for 6 years, and never have heard that it is the cardinal sin to pause heparin even for a couple minutes. But this girl goes on and on about it. She went off about EMS changing pumps over when taking a heparin drip one time because “you cannot ever pause heparin”. She even told me that another nurse had a “pretty big med error” because she paused the heparin to draw the coags (now she didn’t have a second line to draw it from and that’s a whole big different thing). So my question for nurses who manage heparin for longer than I do — is it really as big of a deal as she makes it out to be to pause heparin for short periods of time? Like <10 minutes.
Posted Aug 3, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC