polyurethane nasogastric tubes

NICURN29 · Mar 12, 2014

We do use them, and we change them every 72 hours. The manufacturer of our tubes says up to 30 days, but for infection control reasons, we do not leave them in that long. We tape, for the most part, with pink tape and Tegaderm.

rnkaytee · Mar 13, 2014

We use orange tubes that can be left in for 1 month and tape them with a piece of tegaderm on their chin to protect the skin and then a piece of tegaderm over that - works really well. We also used silastic long-dwell which we used for a month. I'm curious - if the manufacturer says they are recommended for a month why change them every 72 hours?

NICURN29 · Mar 13, 2014

We had a spike in GI issues, and this was a practice change we made as a result, with the thought that leaving the tubes in for that long might have contributed to some infections.

Bortaz, MSN, RN · Mar 14, 2014

There is a risk to everything we do, and it seems to me that placing an NG tube q72* is taking unnecessary risks that might outweigh the lessened risk of infection. Especially since you're dealing with the dirty gut. All of that frequent pushing in of new tubes will surely lead to a tube in the lungs one day.

NicuGal, MSN, RN · Mar 15, 2014

We use silastic and leave them in for 30 days.

NNICU-RN · Mar 20, 2014

All these replies is good.I neber thought of how long the ng was in the baby or when it was changed. In handoff we just communicate the level of the tube. On our unit we use pink tape to mark, duoderm to prevent skin breakdown and tegaderm.