Hi guys, welcome back to Empower Inn. My name is Caroline Porter Thomas. Thank you so much for watching. So today I'm going to do another skill video for you and it's going to be how to remove surgical staples. So the first thing that you want to do is you always wash your hands before you start in a procedure. You want to make sure you use a lot of soap, water, and then or use the hand sanitizer. So the next thing that you want to do is before you start anything, you want to look at the wound very, very closely. So look at the surgical wounds. Whenever you're removing staples, the skin around and where the staples are should be maybe just slightly pink, but there should be no real redness. There should definitely not be any bleeding. There should not be any signs of infections before you take the staples out. The reason for that is once you take the staples out, if there is a chance that the skin could what it's called dehycens, which means that it comes apart. You want to be very careful that it is a safe thing for you to do to remove these staples. The next thing that you want to do is you want to know who you need to be really careful with. So especially on the lower extremities, we have a lot of patients with peripheral vascular disease, we call it PVD for shorts, which means that they have problems with blood circulating in their lower extremities. If you don't have as much blood circulation, then you're not going to have the best tissue healing growth. So you want to be careful with those kind of patients. Also with diabetic patients, you want to also be careful with. So now let's get into the skill and I'm going to show you how to remove the surgical staples. Okay, so let's get started. So in essence, so that you can see the staples a little bit better, I put it on a paper bath. That's just so that you can see them better. I tried to do it in a straight line too, and unfortunately I have no line abilities. So sorry about that. So basically what you want to do, like I said before you start, is you want to look at the wound and make sure that there's not a lot of red or there should be just maybe some slight pinkness. And most of the skin should already be together and visible from, you know, your, you. You also want to measure the wound. Okay, take good measurements, probably in centimeters. And then what you also want to do is count the amount of staples. Okay. You have to use this tool. This is called a stapler mover. If you look right here, you will see that this is a very flat end. And that's what goes next to the patient's skin. And then this part up here, you push down and it makes the two ends of the staple move up. So I hope you can see this. I'm going to do it. So if you see, just comes right out, just like that. So there's one. We just removed one surgical staple. So this should be a very painless process. If you have somebody that's having a lot of pain, look and make sure that there's not an infection because it really should not feel painful at all. Now we just removed two and see. Easy does it. Very, very simple. So what I want to do with these videos is I just want to make foreign hospital equipment to become a little bit more normal to you. So the next thing you need to do is you need to read your doctor's orders. Does the doctor want to dress? Most of the time they want stary strips placed on the incision and that just gives it a little bit extra support. Now the stary strips come in little packages. We're just going to open this package. Of course we would have gloves on, but because it's not a real person, we're not going to worry about that. What I also do is I usually get some tape adhesive, some tape prep and I also just wipe it around there so that it'll stick a little bit better. And then what you can do if the stary strips are ordered, just get this little piece here, put it on one side, try to make it even so that the incision would be right in the middle. And then just put them on nice and gently. Now stary strips, we just tell the patients to let them fall off as needed. They can get they can get them wet, but just know direct rubbing or soap and they can just pat them dry after the shower. Alright guys, I really hope you enjoy that. If you did, please give it a thumbs up and if you want more school's videos post a comment, share this with your friends and I can't wait to see you guys soon. Alright, bye.