Inserting IV Cannulation | IV Tips for Nurses, Paramedics etc..

Hey guys in this video I will show you two tricks about IV cannulation insertion. The first trick is what I call “pushing the plastic” and the second trick I will show you bypass a valve when you insert. Lastly I will talk about some of the critiques I received on my troubleshooting IV video.

So let’s talk about valves. So say you go into a vein and you a valve. What you want to do is to push a little bit of normal saline so that the valve gets pushed aside and insert the catheter as you push a bit of saline. This will allow the valve to open up and you will be able to insert the cannula without issue. 

The next trick I have for you guys is pushing the plastic. So this only works for IV cannulas that use the Nexiva brand. But essentially, once you are in the vein you do not need to push the needle all the way through. Once you get flash back in the needle cannula. You are able to push the plastic filament in the vein quite easily. I often do this as the rate of blowing the vein with the sharp needle end is much lower.

Here is what I mean. This is an IV needle I use. As you can see this metal is quite sharp. But if we remove the needle, the plastic is not sharp and is less likely to go through the vein walls when you are pushing it through. Now let me show you a demonstration.

Critique about using the wrist. Although veins are easy to see in the wrist. The risk of failure and hitting a nerve is quite high. I have gotten a lot of push back on my video where I talked about why we use forearms and I’ll explain more.

Here is a picture of the nerves. Take a moment and look at where the nerves are.

As you can see the surface area around the wrist is much lower and so you are more likely going to hit a nerve or artery if you miss the vein. Therefore in comparison to the ACF or forearm, the wrist is a much worse place to attempt to try for an insert.