Carol James: Hi! I am Carol James. I am Wound, Ostomy and Continence nurse from MedStar Health Visiting Nurse Association. Today, I am here with Mrs. Francis Steel and I will be demonstrating how to change a wound dressing.

The first thing you might want to do is wash your hands with soap and water or if you prefer, you may use hand sanitizer, and actually I'm going to use a hand sanitizer and I am going to have you do it also.

We are going to put out all of our supplies so that you don't have to be going back and forth to actually get the supplies that you need.

And I am going to elevate your leg, take your finger and gently pull up the edge of the tape, and push and pull. You want to discard this old dressing, take off your gloves, use your hand sanitizer for the second time, rub your hands together, and we put on our second set of gloves. I want to take one piece of gauze, hold it against your leg, squirt into the wound. We want to go around from the inner, out, discard, take another gauze, squirt onto the wound your saline, discard, and then you can take one more, and wipe around the wound itself.

Once you have cleaned your wound you want to examine it, because you want to look at it to see if there are any changes in your wound. I use my hand sanitizer again. Once you're finished with that, this is your third set of gloves you're putting on, take a 44, you moisten it with saline, you don't want it too sopping wet, and then you want to open it up so we can fluff it on the wound base itself.

When I say wound base, I mean the area where the tissue is. We don't want to put the dressing outside on the skin, but we want to put it within the wound base itself. So here is where we would apply this. Then we are going to take a piece from the package of the skin protectant, and we are going to apply this around the wound. Now you want to wait for that to dry before you apply your secondary dressing, which is your dressing covering. Then we will apply our dressing.

Tear this before you actually apply your tape to your dressing or you can just do it after you have applied the secondary dressing. As our last step, we washed our hands either with soap and water or used the hand sanitizer. It's really easy to do. It's a simple dressing. Just take your time and just remember to clean your hands between each step.

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