Hi guys, welcome back to Empowerin. I'm Carolyn Puerza. I'm the thank you so much for watching. So today we're going to learn about needle sizes. What's really cool is that I think it's universal, whereas I think it's all around the world, but I definitely know it in the United States. We always correlate the same color needle with the same size. So it doesn't matter where you go, which hospital or which unit you go to, you can always look and find a yellow needle, and that's the same size. It's always going to be the same size. It's always going to be a 24 gauge. Or you can always find a red one, and it's always going to be a team gauge. Or a pink one, and it's always going to be 20 gauge. So just so you guys know the different sizes and colors, I'm going to go over them with you very close. Okay, so I hope you enjoyed this video. If you do like it and it does help you, then please give it a thumbs up, share with your friends, and subscribe to the channel. All right, let's get started. Okay, so here we have the most common needles that we see in the hospital. The first one I'm going to show you is the smallest, and this is an insulin syringe. This insulin syringe is actually a 29 gauge. So if I were to take this off, very carefully, you'll see that it's a very, very, very teeny tiny skinny needle. A lot of times when you're giving people insulin, they don't even feel it. Thank God, right? If you have to have some kind of subcue injection, it's better to not feel pain. Okay, when you just put this particular needle, it's really nice because it comes with a safety lock. And we still need to throw it down the sharps containers, but that is a nice little feature that this does come with. Whenever you see a yellow color, the yellow is going to be 24 gauge. 24 gauge is also known as a pediatric needle. And this is a very, very tiny needle. It is usually used for pediatric patients, like I said, also if you have an elderly patient that has this very, very, very teeny tiny spider veins, it's not ideal, but sometimes we have to resort to this size needle with elderly patients. This is not really a good option, like I was saying, because it's just so tiny. You can see that this is not very long. It usually doesn't last very long. And it's definitely not good. You're not supposed to give blood products or anything through this teeny tiny needle, but sometimes if it's all you can get, then you kind of just have to work with what you've got. So again, this little feature, I'm just going to lock it so I don't hurt myself. After a 20 gauge, the next color is a 22 gauge. This color is blue, so it is a little bit bigger than the 24 gauge. And if you guys have noticed that the 24 gauge is actually smaller than the 22 gauge, so the numbers are actually opposite. So you guys want to just take note of that. So this 22 gauge is what you'll see a lot of times on the adult like med search floors. A lot of people like this needle because it's a little bit smaller than the other needles. And it's a little bit easier to get the vein of this one. I personally like this one my favorite. This is a 20 gauge needle. I like this one because although it is a little bit harder and it's a little bit harder to learn how to use. Once you learn how to use this 20 gauge needle, you're going to have a very, very, very solid IV site as long as you get a good vein. So what you want to do is you want to, you know, once you've developed a really good skill in starting IVs, with this, you can actually get a much stronger vein. A lot of people don't realize when they first start, they want to use that 22 gauge or that blue needle because they think it's easier, but actually sometimes the 22 gauge, it's not strong enough to penetrate through a really strong blood vessel. So that's why I personally like this one right here because usually once you get an IV that's really good with this size, this will stay in for the full four days that you're allowed to stay in and the patient won't have to get poked twice. So I personally like this one as my favorite and you can get blood platyx through this and of course any IV fluids. Next you have this 18 gauge needle. This one is green, it's very large. We don't really, I personally don't really use this one too much. A lot of times I use it in the ER where they have to do a lot of fluid boluses. All of bolus means is a rapid infusion and also a lot of the paramedics use this size as well. So but this is if you can get an IV with this, you have a very, very solid IV. A lot of times this is used for the anti-cubital area which is this area right in your elbow area and that's about it with that one. A different type of needle, this is called a filtered needle and a filtered needle we use a lot of times to draw up medications that are in a glass vial. If you break up on a vial you have to make sure that you do not draw up any glass fragments and give that to your patient so you have to use a filtered needle. So this one has a small filter on the inside and it will get out any glass fragments. Unfortunately this doesn't have a nice handy lock so you have to be very careful with recapping. I usually do it like that just to make sure. When you're in a hurry it's really easy to hurt yourself with you so you have to be very careful. Now this next size right here this is what we call a blunt needle. If you open this here, if you can see this you will notice that this is a very, very large hole. We call it a large bore hole and this is not meant to do anything except extract and mix medications with. So you never want to poke your patient with this. It's just very blunt. See I can do this and it's not hurting me at all. So we pretty much just use this in the hospital to extract medications so actually it usually comes just like this with a syringe on it and we can pull up medications very easily from vials. Again another feature that's not super duper handy with this is that you have to actually recap it and you just have to be very careful. Fortunately with this it is blunt so you you know would be at less risk of hurting yourself but just be careful with that. Make sure you go slow. I know you're busy on your job but just make sure you're very safe and that you don't hurt yourself. Okay guys thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed that. Please let me know what kind of video you want to see in the future and also please give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and it helped you and subscribe to the channel. All right I can't wait to see you guys soon. Bye!