Nasopharyngeal and Oropharyngeal Suctioning: Completing the Procedure (Nursing)

00:00 Now, here's something to know. When you're applying suction here, we don't want to hold down that button, that's our suction control. We don't want to keep that thumb on there continuously. So let me pause here. When you're applying suction, you want to do it intermittently. So, let's recap here, we have advanced the catheter, no suction. When we're coming out, we want to make sure we do intermittent suction. So we simply do this by lifting and not lifting our thumb. And we're doing this as we withdraw the catheter. So that's really important. Now, as you are withdrawing the catheter, you may need to just wrap it around your hand so we can withdraw the length here from the patient's nasal cavity. Sometimes, we may have to repeat this procedure up to like 3 times using that sterile saline. So it's important each pass that we put our catheter back into sterile saline and clean that out. Now again, during this making sure you're checking the patient's breathing and their oxygenation status. Also, if we have to do this multiple times you've got to give your patient a rest. Right? No one wants that down their nasal or oral cavity all the time.

01:21 So make sure between each pass give your patient a rest and reassess. Now once we're all don, we can pull off our sterile glove over the catheter itself, we can get rid of that. Now we can remove or discard any of the PPE that maybe we used, we can perform our hand hygiene, we can position the patient for comfort, make sure we lower that bed and put up those side rails and make sure document the procedure. Now once we're don, make sure you go ahead clean out that catheter then we can take our sterile glove over the catheter and then just wrap this up, pull it over, and discard. And get rid of this. And again, make sure you go back to your patient, make sure you're assessing, the patient feels comfortable as much as possible. When we're done with all of these supplies here, it's a good idea to go ahead, discard our PPE, remove any unnecessary supplies, we can perform our hand hygiene here, and again position the patient for comfort. May not be a bad idea to keep their head up a little bit if they can tolerate it because we are just down that respiratory tract. Lower that bed, put up your side rails for safety, and also document the procedure.