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 Suction Catheter Saves Fingers
Thom Dick, Thursday, April 29, 2010
Jems.com
We do so much of what we do because ... well, that’s how we’ve always done it. Think about it. We roll people onto backboards. We put ’em on oxygen. We carry ’em down stairs. And, we try our dangedest to vacuum their vomit with Yankauer suction tips. (How dumb is that?)
There’s probably been a Yankauer attached to every ambulance you’ve ever seen, Life-Saver’ all the way back to the days of “you call, we haul, that’s all.” You know what a Yankauer’s good for? Beer and spit. It was designed for use in ORs, to sanitize the airways of surgical patients who have been NPO for 12 hours.
...Anything’s better than a Yankauer for removing slime, like blood clots or boogers. But for solids, you pretty much need a Shop-Vac. Or a spoon.
...Their answer is the S3 (for scoop, suction, sump). It’s about the size of a chubby Yankauer, but it’s soft, like silicone—not quite rigid. There’s a bendable stylette running down its middle that holds the catheter’s shape any way you want it to. A sliding clip, located about where your thumb would be during use, can either uncover or occlude a bypass port, depending on how you need to use the thing. And best of all, it’s a spoon.
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