Clinical Skills - Straight Catheter Insertion (Female)

Hi, I'm Ellis with LevelUp RN. In this video, I'll be demonstrating how to insert a straight urinary catheter on a patient who has a vagina. I'll be following the steps that we've included in our clinical nursing skills deck. So if you have the deck, grab this card. You can follow right along with me. If you don't have the deck and you're interested in checking them out, then you can pop on over to leveluprn.com.

Before I do a straight catheter insertion on a female patient, I would make sure they're positioned in a dorsal recumbent position with their knees out and provide any perennial care that's necessary. Then I simply grab my catheter tray. So I'm going to go ahead and open that. I'm going to pull my patient's gown up to expose her urethra. I can take this initial pad and place it shiny side down, taking care not to touch too much of it. All right. Going to take these gloves out. Go ahead and put my sterile gloves on. All right. So I'm just going to get my dominant hand cuffed with my non-dominant hand.

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And then my other cuff with my dominant hand. All right. I got to fix these fingers. They got a little wonky. All right. And then the procedure is actually almost identical to an indwelling catheter. I'm going to do all the same steps up until leaving it in their bladder. Right? So I'm going to get my finish straight to drape and place it over their labia. I'm going to open my swabs so that they're ready. These kits are usually red with the red tubing. I've got a collection cup if I need a sterile collection. And I, of course, have a little packet of lubricant. So I'm going to go ahead and open my packet of lubricant and generously lubricate my catheter tip. Get in there. There we go. All right. I'm going to go ahead and move my tray, touching just the inside so that I can access it. I'm going to grab my first swab. And then just like before, once I touch my patient, this hand will not be sterile. So I'm going to spread her labia with my non-dominant hand, do one side, discard, the other side discard, and then we'll do our final one down the center, making sure that we keep the labia spread until we're completing our insertion down the center, discard.

I can just take this and discard it as well. I'm going to go ahead and remove my bag of lubricant. Oh, my goodness. There we go. All right. And now I'll go ahead and grab my catheter. Now, this, of course, is an open catheter, meaning there's no bag on the end. Once this gets inserted into their urethra and accesses urine, urine starts coming out the end of this. So all you need to be wary of is that this end of the catheter must be in a container to catch that urine. And the container that these kits come in is built for that purpose. They're hard plastic. So you can just leave that end in the hard plastic container while you insert the catheter into the urethra. And at some point urine would start exiting and you would simply wait until the urine has completed. Once that's completed, you simply withdraw the catheter. I like to kind of twist it up in my hand like that, and then I can even go ahead and wrap it up so that it doesn't spill anywhere. And then I would discard of all of that. Then I could put new gloves on and simply clean up my patient. And then I could either measure this on the container itself or if I wanted to, I could pour it into something else. I could use the sterile cup, etc. And then I simply clean my patient and reposition them. And that's how I straight cath a female patient.