Clinical Skills - Straight Catheter Insertion (Male)

Hi, I'm Ellis with Level Up RN. In this video, I'll demonstrate how to insert a straight urinary catheter on a patient who has a penis. I'll be following along with the steps in our Clinical Nursing skills deck. So if you have the deck, go ahead and grab it; you can follow along with me. If you don't have the deck and you're interested in checking it out, then pop on over to leveluprn.com.

Before I can insert a straight cath into a patient who is male, I need to have positioned them in a supine position and done any perineal care that would be appropriate. So I'm going to go ahead and pull his gown up so that he'll be ready once I finish opening my kit. So I'm going to open this kit, and I'm going to grab this top drape and place it under him. I'm going to go ahead and grab my gloves, grabbing that cuff of my dominant hand with my nondominant hand, tucking into my nondominant glove with my dominant hand, keeping that thumb out and removing that packet. All right? Grab my fenestrated drape. Then all that's left in here are going to be my swab sticks, my lubricant, and a sterile collection container if I need to collect a sample.

So I'm going to go ahead and open that lubricant, insert the catheter into it so it's generously lubricated, and get my swab sticks ready. And then I'm going to move this tray down here. I'm going to get my first swab stick and I'm going to grab the penis, holding it at a 90 degree angle to the body. If he has a foreskin, I would, of course, pull the foreskin down - get up there - so that I can access the urethra. So I'm going to use that first swab to do a circle, discard it, second swab another circle. Just going to drop that in the trash actually. And his third and final swab, drop that in the trash. I can move this into the trash, and then I'm going to grab my catheter, being very careful not to let that end hit anything. But I wanted to demonstrate that the difference between our indwelling catheter and our straight catheter is that the straight catheter doesn't have a bag attached to the end. This is an open system. So once this tip goes into the penis and accesses urine, urine will start exiting the end of the catheter. So we need to make sure that the end of this catheter is in a container that is safe and appropriate to collect urine. The container that contains-- ha, the containter that contains the kits for straight catheterization is a hard plastic and is made for that purpose. So it's fine to just leave the end of this catheter in that container and go ahead and catheterize the patient.

Alternatively, I could use the urinal or I could leave it in the sterile specimen cup that comes in the container to go ahead and collect that urine sample. So with this lubricated catheter tip, I'm going to insert it into my patient's urethra until urine is available, and I would watch urine drain from this end of the catheter into the container and I would simply wait until the urine has completed. Once the urine has ceased flowing, I simply take this and collect it, withdrawing it out of the penis and discarding of it.

And when that's done, I now have to make sure that I measure and dispose of this correctly. It does have measuring on the side of most containers. Alternatively, I could dump it into a graduated cylinder or a urinal to measure it more efficiently. And then, of course, I would need to waste that urine and discard of this, discard of my other items, and I would need to clean and reposition my patient appropriately. And that's how you insert a straight catheter on a male patient.