There are several kinds of infusion that can be carried out depending on the patient’s requirement and thus the Infusion pump would have to be programmed accordingly. Continuous infusion is the type that is carried out in small pulses of time, between five hundred to a thousand micro liters, depending on the design of the equipment. Intermittent infusion is the kind which has a high rate of infusion. The timings for the infusion are programmable. This type of infusion is usually carried out to administer antibiotics or such other drugs that have a chance of disturbing the blood vessel. There is also a type that allows a patient controlled infusion. The rate of the infusion can be controlled by the patient through a pressure pad or a single button which is attached to the device. There are also some infusion pumps that allow the control of the amount of infusion being carried out depending on the time of the day. This kind of infusion is sometimes important to particular types of medication.

There are two basic categories of such pumps. Large volume pumps are the ones that are used to pump fluid into the patient’s body which is enough to supplement for feeding him or her. Small volume pumps on the other hand infuse medication or hormones according to the medication procedure. Within these classes there are different designs of such pumps. Some may be portable for frequent personal use or to be used for emergencies such as on the battlefield, but most are designed to be used professionally in hospitals.

The major need for these infusion pumps is because they carry out a function that would be in practice extremely expensive and unreliable if the same function were to be carried out manually by the nursing staff. For example they can administer as low as 0.1 ML per hour of infusion, which is too small a number for a drip, or even infusions every minute.