How To Remove Sutures And Clips From Wounds

This skills based training video focuses on wounds & sutures. GP Nurse, Claire explains aseptic technique procedure why wound hygiene is so crucial.

Disclaimer About This Training Video

This video will explain in detail what you can expect to do. It will also supplement any existing qualification and experience you have in this subject and procedures, refresh your memory and prepare you for a regulated training course. (Of course, it is not a substitute for a course.) You can also find regulated training courses on Nurses.co.uk. Our courses will build your CPD, provide you with a certificate, and enhance your CV when job hunting.

Topics covered in this article

Healthcare Associated Infections

What Is Aseptic Technique?

Aseptic Technique Procedure

Keeping The Wound Sterile

Conclusion

Healthcare Associated Infections

Healthcare associated infections are infections that occur whilst receiving health care from somebody. So this is why it's really, really important to do aseptic technique. This is really high statistics, and again, really important. We shouldn't be letting this happen. An aseptic technique is something we always use when we do wound dressings.

If you're inserting a cannula, for example, if you're doing IV medications, if you're inserting a catheter into the body, this is a procedure that we're doing that's going to prevent those harmful microorganisms from getting into somebody's body. That's going to cause disturbance. That's going to start infecting people, that's going to kick off the chaos and potentially cause sepsis as a result. So anything we can do to reduce that is what this is for.

What Is Aseptic Technique?

And this is also called the aseptic non-touch technique, the clean technique, asepsis technique. There's so many different names for it but they all pretty much mean the same thing. You're preventing harm from that patient. You're preventing introducing any bacteria going into that patient. So it's got to be a clean, sterile field and you're not introducing anything into that person. And the stages of the aseptic technique procedure are hand hygiene, storage of equipment, preparing equipment, consent from your patient, the environment that you're working, is it sterile environment, is it clean? The use of gloves and apron, maintaining that sterile field. So not letting anything else touch your sterile fields that isn't sterile and the equipment disposal at the end of your procedure. So there's actually a lot to think about when you're doing this sort of technique, but I just wanted to run through the aseptic technique procedure.

Aseptic Technique Procedure

This is what I do in my clinics. I'm just going to show you now a video of my trolley, what I do at work and how I try as best as possible to keep aseptic technique in place, prevent harm, prevent bacteria going into my patient and as best as I can in the community setting. So this is my dressing pack, I like the medium packs. And now when you open the top layer and you take your middle bit out, you want to make sure that when you're opening this layer, that you're being as sterile as possible. So you're trying to avoid touching what's inside this white paper that I'm unfolding now.

And then you'll just take your little white bag out of the pack, and you can use this as your sterile glove to rearrange your pack, like so. You're then going to open your dressings without touching the inside of the pack of the dressing. I'm going to show you this in this video now. You just open the pack like this, and then just let it fall. Again, opening it like this, and then just let it fall onto your trolley or your safe space or your sterile space. And then this is my sterile field. And lastly, before I call my patient, I'm just going to warm up the saline under some warm water. Not so it's a boiling hot, but just so that it's warm enough to clean the wound with. So, that is it, obviously I can show you the full video because patient confidentiality. So I couldn't actually show you the wound cleaning and dressing, all of that.

Keeping The Wound Sterile

But literally, when I first bring my patient in, I've just got some standard gloves on, my apron on, I will remove all of the dressing from the patient and then I will change my gloves, wash my hands in between, put my sterile gloves on. And that's when I will clean my patient's wound down, making sure I've got the sterile gloves, nothing else is touching that wound that's not sterile and doing that as best as I can because the last thing you want is something getting infected and then them getting sepsis and then them needing hospital admissions and potentially dying as a result. So as best as I can, I'm managing that out there in my clinics. And word of warning, sometimes you can do everything you can to keep it as clean as possible and it will still get infected. So I've had patients before that have took their own dressings off.

They've scratched it themselves because it's got itchy and they've scratched it. They've got animal hair in it, all sorts of things can cause infections. It can just be just one of them things that happen. And unfortunately, it does develop. And then it does go into septic shock and then the patient does need admission to hospital. I had one of these patients quite recently actually, who were doing their dressings from home. They got a lot of hair and a lot of little bits and things into their wound from home. They had the rash all the way up, this cellulitis all the way up their body. It was quite horrific actually. And they needed emergency admission for IV antibiotics, IV fluids, just to get them well again. So yeah, word of warning guys, it doesn't matter how well you do it.

Conclusion

Sometimes it'll still get infected, but we must, must, must try our absolute best to put all of these things in place to protect our patients. This is why we're here. This is why we Nurses, you know, we don't want to cause injury to our patient. We don't want to cause harm to a patient, and we want to reduce that as much as possible. So hopefully, with aseptic technique and doing the best that you can is all going to help that happen. So I hope you found this video useful. I'm going to do a few more little clinical skills videos. I find these really helpful I think. I know I found them helpful when I was a Student Nurse. Let me know if there's something that you want me to do in particular, then let me know. And if I can, I will, I can't do things like IV medications, because I can't do IVs unfortunately. But if there's anything that you can think of that I can do from my home, from a clinic, let me know and I will talk you through it. But for now, goodbye and have an amazing day.