 Welcome to Nursing School Explained and this video on physical assessment techniques. Like everything in nursing, we usually follow a certain order of the way we do things and that has a purpose because this way we don't forget anything. So when it comes to physical assessment, it is very important to be able to assess the patient carefully to detect any changes that might happen in their status or detect any abnormalities. And in the assessment techniques, we always follow this acronym IAPP, which stands for inspection, auscultation, percussion and palpation. So if you always follow the IAPP acronym, you won't forget anything and hopefully you'll be able to assess your patient correctly so that you are able to determine how they are doing. So let's look over those. First inspection and this is something that you do every day, whether you are in nursing school or not. You observe, you look at other people, you look at their facial expressions, at their body posture, at their overall pain level, their facial expressions, their gait, their posture, how are they doing, do they look like they're sad, like they're angry. So it's very easy to do but sometimes we forget about this inspection. Now when you move on to inspecting, let's say, hair color or the consistency of it or the skin color and to see any rashes, that usually comes into the field of view right away. So inspection is the very first one that we always want to do. Now second is auscultation, where we'll use our stethoscope to listen to the patient's body. There are a variety of different stethoscopes out there from the most inexpensive to the most expensive ones and please watch my separate video on the different stethoscopes so that you hopefully can help, so that I can help you pick one that works best for you. For our stethoscopes, we use the diaphragm for most of our auscultation needs. So that's mostly for the hard lungs and bellies, typically what we auscultate. But we use the bell for high-pitched sounds such as murmurs, so over the heart valves, as well as for breweries, such as could be over the carotid arteries or the renal arteries or maybe even a dialysis shunt if the patient has a brewery right there, this abnormal connection between the arteries and the veins. And then we move on to percussion, percussion is an assessment technique that is kind of old school. It is not commonly used anymore because mostly in the western world we have a lot of different tools that help us determine what's going on underneath, such as X-ray CT scans. But if you're living in a more rural area where this is not readily available or even you're interested in going on medical missions where you might not have these assessment tools or diagnostic tests available, percussion is a very nice technique to know so that you can assess the patient in a little bit more detail. And there is direct and indirect percussion and basically what it is you use your hands or your finger as a tool to drum on the patient's chest abdomen, sinuses to produce a certain sound and then depending on the sound that's expected then you know if it's normal or abnormal and watch my different video where I go into the different sounds that you hear with percussion. And then our last assessment technique is palpation. So we always want to do light palpation before we do the deep palpation and that really is using our tactile senses to assess for normal or any abnormalities that we might find in our assessment and be sure that you always ask the patient for permission first so that you add, that you tell them what you're going to do so that they are aware. Now if there are areas that are tender so let's say the patient complains of abdominal pain or they just had surgery we certainly want to stay away from that area with deep palpation and if it's for example an abdominal palpation then we want to do the area that's tender last because then the patient is going to be very uncomfortable. So thank you for watching this video on the different assessment techniques. I also have videos that go into the different things that we hear on the exploitation of the lungs as well as the percussion of the chest and the abdomen and remember to always refer back to this IAPP acronym that will help you in your physical assessment techniques and also watch my videos where I actually perform physical assessments on a patient depending on a focused problem and those will be five different problems so please watch for those videos coming up. Please give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video it helps me keep this channel going and I'll see you soon right here on Nursing School Explained.