Tips for Helping You Find a Vein before Drawing Blood or Starting IVs

Being successful at IVs takes a lot of practice, skill, and some tricks (which you will learn over time). When I graduated from nursing school, I was HORRIBLE at starting IVs (99% of new nurse graduates are unless they worked as a LPN or EMS before being a RN).

As I said in my last post about IVs, my confidence was gone after the first couple of months of being a nurse and I would 9 times out of 10 try to get someone else to start them for me. I didn't want to put the patient through unnecessary pain and aggravation.

I would say to myself "well I will learn how to start them eventually". Well eventually I did and I have to say I am pretty good at them now.

One of my problems with starting IVs was finding a vein. In order to be successful at IVs you must know where to look for a vein. In the human arm there are certain areas where most people have veins and they are very easy to find and hit with the IV needle if you know where to look.

Below is a video I made demonstrating how to find veins and how to avoid those pesky "rolling" veins. The person I am using in this video is the best case scenarios and has great veins so he made the perfect candidate to educate students about veins.



Sarah

What is the Difference Between IV Needle Gauges? | 18, 20, & 22 Gauge IV Needles

While I was a nursing student in clinicals, I would always hear nurses telling other nurses in report "the patient has a 22 in the RAC". I remember asking my preceptor "I know this may be a REALLY dumb question but what does 22 mean?". I knew the reporting nurse must have been talking about an IV because she said RAC but I had no clue why she was saying it was a 22.

My preceptor sort of chuckled and said that 22 gauge meant it was the size of the IV catheter the patient had. Before that incident, it hadn't really dawned on me that there were different types of IV catheters out there and as a nurse it is important to know which IV gauge you can administer blood through and so on.

So to help you nursing students or new nurses out there learn about the different IV gauges and what they look like I have created a video. Also, click the link for more information about different IV gauge needles.




Sarah