Wounds and sutures
Assessing and cleaning a wound, local anaesthesia, materials, stitches, knots, staples, adhesives and splints.
12 pages
Procedure
- Animal and human bites: clean, close or leave openBites carry mouth germs deep into the skin, so they are washed out thoroughly, often left open…
- Assessing a wound: close it now, later or never?Before stitching, the doctor checks how and when the cut happened, how dirty it is and what lies…
- Cleaning and irrigating a wound before closureWashing a wound out with a steady stream of clean fluid removes dirt and germs, which is the…
- Infiltrating local anaesthetic and digital blocksA numbing medicine is injected around a wound or at the base of a finger so it can be cleaned…
- Running and subcuticular stitchesOne continuous thread closing a whole wound, either over the skin or hidden inside it for a neat…
- Splints and the plaster backslabA firm support moulded along part of a limb, not all the way round, that holds an injury still…
- Staples, adhesive strips and tissue adhesiveQuick ways to close simple cuts without stitches: metal staples, sticky paper strips or a skin…
- Suture materials and needles: absorbable or not, sizes and choiceStitches come in threads that dissolve or stay, in many thicknesses, on needles of different…
- The simple interrupted stitchSingle stitches, each tied and cut on its own, that hold the two edges of a cut together while…
- Tying an instrument knotTying a secure knot with the needle holder instead of the fingers, quicker and using less thread
- Vertical and horizontal mattress stitchesTwo-pass stitches that turn the wound edges up or spread the pull, used when a simple stitch is…
Interpretation
A to Z
Educational content; it does not replace supervised hands-on training, your institution's protocols or a prescriber's order. A procedure is learnt with a teacher and done only once you are trained to do it.
Representative model, for educational purposes only.