 Welcome to Nursing School Explained in this video on the assessment of lower extremity edema. This is something that I see in students all the time where the pressing of the fingers against the patient's skin is not quite firm enough and long enough to really elicit a response. So what we want to do is find the spot that's somewhere on that tibia above the patient's ankle. Take two fingers and press down pretty firmly. You can see the last knuckles of my fingers are kind of bending as I exert the pressure here and hold it for a good five to ten seconds. When you let go of that pressure, you can run your fingers over it and see if there's any indentation in the patient's skin. Now the color is also going to change. It's going to blanch very briefly and let's do it again on the other side. There was just a trace of edema when I ran my finger over it. So now I'm going to compare it to the patient's left side. So again, I'm going to come in, press here, over the tibia, hold some pretty good pressure for about five to ten seconds and then let go, observe and also run my finger over it to see if there's any indentation. And there is a slight indentation here, which is a trace of edema, but it goes away right away. So this is the correct way on how to assess lower extremity edema. If the patient here had some significant edema, then you want to make your way up along the shin and again hold it in each spot for five to ten seconds to see how far up the lower extremity that edema extends and it might go all the way up to the thigh or maybe even the groin and then you can chart it as such and maybe down here, it's a plus three pitting and up in the thigh, it's only a plus one, but you need to evaluate the different stages and the different locations of the edema. Please also check out my other video where I explain the different ways or how to grade the edema from pitting and what that really means. Thanks for watching. See you soon.