Nasogastric and Nasoenteric Tubes: Introduction (Nursing)

00:00 I'd like to talk to you today about nasogastric or nasoenteric tubes. So I'm going to give you an overview of this today and this is really important because you're going to encounter this type of nursing procedure and maybe even pediatrics in medical surgical and the ICU settings. This can be applicable to many areas which I'll definitely see it there.

00:27 So let's talk about what is a gastric tube first. So when we're talking about nasogastric or nasoenteric, I want you to really think about the GI tract as we're talking through this today. So, we're talking about these types of tubes, these are plastic tubes that are inserted through the nose or the mouth and pass down our throat, down into our stomach or our small intestine. Sounds pretty uncomfortable, right? But we'll talk about this a little bit more later in the presentation. So why do we even use these tubes? So these are really helpful for us in a lot of different type of patient situations. So enteral feeding is one.

01:07 So again, when you hear that enteral word, I want you to think about GI and think about the intake of food through the GI tract when you're talking about enteral. Also, sometimes we need to take medications through this route. We also may need to decompress the stomach. So what we're talking about by this is sometimes we have an excess of stomach contents or air and we need to remove those from the stomach, and we can use those tubes for that. Also, we can administer contrast dye for certain procedures so we can better visualize the stomach or the esophagus.