Ways to Ruin a Urine Sample (Nursing)

00:00 Now what are the things that most commonly happen in a hospital or even a home setting that ruin a 24-hour sample.

00:08 And see what that says in the pink line right there, 4 reasons you'll have to start over.

00:14 And I would love to tell you I've never had to do this but I have, for multiple reasons in everyone is irritable when we have to do this more than one time.

00:24 You delay diagnosis, you delayed deciding what to do.

00:27 So it's really important that you're not the cause of that delay.

00:32 So first reason, forget to collect some of the urine patient forgets they go up they go to the bathroom.

00:38 You don't have the urine see if they have a foley catheter in that automatically drains us that's fairly easy.

00:44 But if the patient doesn't have a catheter in and you know, we try to avoid that with most patients because of the risk of infection.

00:53 We've got a problem.

00:54 So normally what we do in a hospital setting is we will put a strip of toilet paper taped across the toilet bowl to remind them or we remove a urinal from the room because we want them to call us to ask us so we can remind them it's got to go in that container.

01:10 So do whatever it takes to visually remind your client.

01:14 They don't have a foley catheter that you've marked off the toilet seat or you taken off the urinal moved it to an inconvenient spot.

01:21 So the patient will remember oh wait, we're doing something different this time.

01:26 So number one reason you forget to collect some of the urine.

01:30 Second reason, the timings off.

01:33 If you go beyond the 24-hour collection period it's not going to be accurate.

01:37 So if you get an extra sample in there, it's done.

01:41 We have to start all over again.

01:43 So number 1, forget to collect some of the urine, have to start over.

01:48 Number 2, going longer than 24 hours.

01:52 So you like, Oh wait, it's nine o'clock.

01:54 It's no good.

01:55 You have to start all over again.

01:57 What if you spill the urine? Okay, that's not Even a pleasant thought but all of us have had that happen in a hospital setting but if you're trying to transfer the urine into the specimen collector and you spill some game over, you've got to start again.

02:13 Number 4 is the one that's really kind of weird.

02:16 But if you don't keep the year in cold for that entire 24-hour period while you're collecting it, you'll have to start over.

02:23 So look at this information.

02:25 How does this help you as a nurse? Well, you need to understand these are four things you want to be careful about, but as a nursing student, it also helps you because this might come to you in a question that says which of the following instances would require an immediate nursing intervention.

02:44 Well, if you see one of these things for a 24 hour urine sample, you see someone missing the time, spilling a little bit of it, going beyond the time, forgetting to collect some, those are going to be the things that require immediate intervention and that means everybody starts over you have to discard that specimen that you started and start the whole process again.