How to Treat Hyperkalemia

In almost all cases you will see that potassium drop without any treatment whatsoever and it's essentially as those cellular shifts start to happen with the insulin. So absolutely not in the initial stages because you know it's going to drop but there will be obviously the odd patient who might be in renal failure whereby if that doesn't occur after say one to two hours you want to be consulting critical care teams. When we are treating them we are going to be monitoring the response so we're going to be looking at their blood ketone concentration, which should hopefully fall by 0.5 mils per litre per hour. The BNF would say that you give 10% glucose at a rate of 125 mil