 Welcome to Nursing School Explained and this video on how to apply Stereostrips. Stereostrips are closure devices that most often are being used to secure the approximation of the wound after staples or sutures have been removed. And so you might encounter this in the inpatient as well as the outpatient setting when patients might come in for their post-op visit. Now the application of stereostrips is a clean not a sterile procedure and in this case of this wound the sutures or staples have already been removed. Now it takes you need to select the correct size of stereostrips and they typically come in one length looks like this and then they come in different widths. So in this case these are a half an inch by four inches long or 12 millimeters by 100 millimeters long and the length is typically the same although they do come in bigger strips. Now keep in mind that we are going to apply these strips across the patient's wound so we want to make sure we have enough to kind of hold the wound together but also we want to make sure that we don't overlap too much because that in like any tape or strip it could irritate the patient's skin. And in this case this wound here is not very properly approximated so but we'll just say for purposes of this video that it's better approximated and the staples or sutures have been removed. Now I also want to make sure I have some cleaning solution here to clean the wound with and then some sterile scissors because I might need to trim the edges. So then I can and the important thing is that I do have sterile scissors because I don't want to contaminate and the wound the surgical wound that this patient has. So I'm going to prepare my strip so I'll take out one of these strips and this is a little bit too long so I'll take my scissors here and I'll cut off the end so to make it the correct length for this particular patient. Sometimes it helps there is a thing called a benzointincture which is a solution that comes in a in a tiny little vial that you would squeeze and you could squeeze that on the wound edges where the stereostrips are going to adhere and it'll just make the strips stick better to the patient. But so now I've cut my stereostrips I put them back in their wrapper and I will take the cleaning solution and clean the wound like we usually do from one side to the other on one edge and then put this in my disposal and then clean the other edge and then clean down the middle. Now I'm ready to apply my stereostrips and the key is that you start on one end of the wound and make yourself toward your way the other way. Sometimes in a case like this where there's a little bit of an opening it might help if you put in one on each end and then one in the middle otherwise you might kind of push the opening towards one end or the other. And the other key is that you want to kind of secure the stereostrip on one end and then kind of pull it over to help close that wound. And in this case since we have that big opening here I will put one right across here so again tape this down and then hold it closed and you can see I can really pull these wound edges together and hold them together. Now on this particular mannequin simulator here the stereostrips don't stick that well but the tincture of Benzo indefinitely helps if you have that available. So now that I've secured these three I'm going to place a couple more in between always pulling the one end down on one side and then really pulling on this tab so the wound edges can be together. And you can see they're not perfectly the same length perfectly cut but that's perfectly fine as long as we have them together. So you can see how actually there's a little bit of a space now that has come from that that's a little bit more space in between there because I've been able to close the wound with these stereostrips and this will be fine and then depending on the orders we can either cover this wound or just leave it open to air and then the patient will usually ask when do these come off and the answer is they don't come off they will fall off automatically. And so usually at this point of the wound healing the patient will be able to shower and then eventually the edges will start to peel off and will simulate this here. And so the best thing to tell the patient if the edges start to peel off don't pull off the stereostrip because you might disrupt any granulation tissue that you have in here or you might also open up the wound again. So if this happens and it's annoying and in the way you want to tell them just to trim the edges and then eventually with time these stereostrips will just kind of fall off on their own and then let's say another strip was to peel off and this typically takes a few days so we the patient could just trim the edges and then eventually it'll just loosen up enough most likely that's going to happen in the shower after water runs over the wound and you can and they can then very easily remove the stereostrips. Typically they'll stay on for a few days it depends on the patient's activity level and the exposure of the shower and the length of the exposure to water clearly because this wound is still fresh we don't want the patient to be submerged in water so a bathtub or a hot tub until it's completely healed and they are instructed to do that by their surgeon. So thank you for watching this video on nursing school explaining how to apply stereostrips and I'll see you soon.