Diane Newman: I'm Diane Newman. I'm a nurse practitioner. I specialize in urology. The specialty of urology treats men and women who have what we call bladder dysfunction. And today I'm here to talk about how we treat men and women who may not be able to empty their bladder. They may have something we call urinary retention or incomplete bladder emptying. And what I have here is catheters, urinary catheters. Urinary catheters are placed in the bladder to drain it when that person cannot urinate or pee the right way. They can't really empty their bladder out. We put in catheters, intermittently, which means that they drain the bladder of the urine and then they're taken out. And today, I'm going to show you two different types of catheters by two companies. One is a catheter by Convatech. We're going to go over some of their products and the other company is Cure Medical and they also manufacture catheters.

Now there's a couple things that are important about catheters. Number one is actually the packaging. It tells you who makes the catheter, it tells you what size it is. And we size catheters, what's called French sizes and that's the size of the diameter of the catheter. And it also has re-order numbers. I want to go through a few components of these catheters. First, I want to talk about the size of the catheter because there's a really, really interesting way that you know what size that catheter is by the color of what we call the funnel. So this is a catheter, okay? It's not like an in-dwelling, fully catheter because this does not stay in the bladder. This goes in the bladder, drains the urine out, and then it's discarded. This is one sided catheter. And as you can see, it has a funnel, an opening there where the urine can drain out. And what's important about the funnel is it's color coded. And by that it means the color relates to what size it is.

This is green, and it's a 14th French. This is the other end of the catheter. And this is the tip of the catheter, which goes into the bladder. As you can see here, this catheter has what we call eyelets. They're not opposing, which means they're on one side of the catheter on the other side, so that when you put the catheter in, the urine drains through those eyelets. What's important about catheters that you may be using to drain your bladder, is that they're good quality. But also the fact that these eyelets are smooth, we call them, they're polished, not all catheters have very smooth eyelets. So it's really important that you know what product you're getting and what you're using to put in your bladder, because you don't want to cause any trauma as you put that catheter into your bladder during the urine.

This is another different type of packaging. And you can see it's still another similar to this 14 French, but it's kind of packaged a little bit differently, which may be easier for someone to carry say, if they're going to work or they're going outside their home and they have to catheterize themselves. And this is another type of catheter, and this catheter is, I want to show you the funnel here because the funnel is a different color, it's white. So that tells you the French size. And as you can see by the packaging here that this French size of this catheter, which is a white funnel tip is a 12 French size. So it's important to understand the different parts of it. And that's what I thought I'd like to show you is, what are the different parts of the catheter?

So again, we have the tip that goes into the bladder. We have eyelids that should be smooth where the urine is drained through the catheter, to the outside, through the funnel. And the funnel color tells you what size it is. Also, sometimes people will call the funnel, the port, but that's actually where the urine drains out. So thanks for listening.