Deep Tissue Injury (DTI) (Nursing)

00:04 So guys, we just talked about four different stages of pressure injury care.

00:10 Now here are some other types of injury that we need to be aware of.

00:14 So one of these is called a deep tissue injury.

00:17 So when we suspect a deep tissue injury, here's the problem, guys, this is kind of scary because the skin looks, it looks pretty unassuming, like it looks not too terrible.

00:29 The issue with these injuries, we really, it's hard to assess to figure out what's all underneath there, right? So as you can see on this slide, that skin's actually intact.

00:39 There's going to be some weird discoloration, though and this is where it changes from a deep tissue injury on assessment versus like a stage one.

00:48 So what differentiates this is it's you're going to see like a really deep purplish, and like a deep red color that you should not see, like with a stage one.

00:59 So then again, the deep tissue injury is going to be more serious.

01:03 The reason why you may see that discoloration, there may not be good blood flow to the tissues, and otherwise known as ischemia, and that guys can be a serious problem.

01:14 So just like stage one, this one is also nonblanchable but the weird thing with a deep tissue, your skin can kind of feel boggy and kind of soft.

01:24 That's also a really big issue that there's something occurring underneath the surface.

01:31 Now let's take a look at this slide.

01:34 We talked about different stages, now if you're looking at this with this black on the top, why is this considered unstageable? So let's take a moment and kind of freeze here and take a look.

01:46 This is not normal, or like the other ones that we saw, right? Okay, so let's take a closer look.

01:53 You see on this wound, this one's going to be really hard to stage, right? We've got what we call eschar, or necrotic tissue on the top.

02:01 It often looks like this on top of your wound.

02:04 Now you guys have probably seen oh, like a scab or something like that, when you have a wound heal.

02:11 This top looks much like that, but the problem is, is with a wound like this, there's a lot of pressure injury and a lot of injury underneath the surface.

02:22 So if we're talking about a serious deep wound, many times we're going to have to scrape and remove all this black eschar or necrotic tissue to really see what's going underneath.

02:37 Now when we're talking about pressure injury as a whole, what's the goal here guys? Well, as you know, we've talked about pressure injury, so pressures are culprit, right? So if we can, we need to offload that area to help with circulation and for healing.