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Baby Basics: Nasal Suctioning


[Introduction music and imagery displays]


Hi, I'm Jennifer Walker from Moms on Call. Today, we're going to be talking about nasal suctioning. If you're your baby is congested or you hear them making this little ... kind of noise, then we need to do a little nasal saline and sometimes even suck it out with a nasal syringe. But I'm going to show you exactly how a pediatric nurse does it.
                                        
Here are the items to have on hand: a bulb syringe. We really like the ones that they give you from the hospital. Normal saline nasal drops. Make sure to get just plain saline non-medicated and a burp cloth or baby wipe.
                                        
So what we're going to do is we're going to take this saline spray, it's non-medicated and it's not going to hurt her. So we take these little drops and it'll drop out if it gets in her eyes or if it gets on her face, it's totally fine because we're going for a tiny target. So I'm going to pull this pacifier out. I'm going to take my hand and put it under the back of her neck. You can see that little startle reflex got triggered. And that tilts her head back when I push my middle finger right up to the back of her neck. And then I'll just take this and get a few drops in each side. A couple drops, go in there. Good job, good job.
                                        
And then I put the paci in just to encourage her to suck and swallow some of that down. And what it did is it just took some of congestion and just made it a little watery so she could swallow it. Now, if that doesn't completely clear the congestion, then we're going to move on to the nasal suctioning.
                                        
So we'll take the nasal suction or we want to depress it completely. If this is her nostril, I'm going to put it in, tilt it up and let that suction release. Then I'm going to shoot it over here on this little wipey that I put out. They usually don't like this process very much, so it's normally pretty loud and that's okay. But I'm going to hold her in a C-hold on her head. I'm going to occlude one nostril. And then I come in, this is completely depressed and I go up and back, and just make little circular motions and you'll see it get some of that snot out. Then I can shoot the snot onto that baby wipe.
                                        
Then I'll go to the other side and I'll go in the other side up and back, a little circle. It doesn't hurt them at all. They tend to not like it very much. And so it's good just to let them get a little swallow in. That's what the pacifier helps them do. And we don't want to do this more than three to four times a day so it doesn't get irritating, but we can do these drops as many as five to six times a day all by themselves. And it just helps them to breathe better so that they can feed better, and so that they don't have that congestion.