Diane Newman: I'm Diane Newman. I'm a nurse practitioner and I've specialized in urology for the past 35 years. Urology is a medical specialty that treats men and women who have bladder problems. And by that, I mean, you may have where you can't control your bladder or you cannot empty your bladder. So you really can't pee out all the urine that you have to from your bladder whenever you want to. We call this urinary retention, our incomplete bladder emptying, and there's certain people that may develop this problem. Someone who has a spinal cord injury, someone who maybe has diabetes can develop problems with emptying their bladder. And maybe someone say with Parkinson's or multiple sclerosis.

Now, when you can't empty your bladder, you have to use a catheter. We call them intermittent catheters. They're urinary catheters that are placed through the tube that carries urine from your bladder, the urethra, into your bladder to drain out the urine. They're called intermittent because you do these bladder drainages, catheterizations intermittently, usually several times a day. All right? To make sure that that urine stays out of that bladder. So you intermittently catheterize yourself.

And what I have here today is some products by Convatec. They're called the GentleCath Glide. And I want to talk to you about a concept of catheterization called no-touch. And there's some belief that sometimes why individuals who catheterize get urinary tract infections is because they may be touching the catheter. The surface of the catheter goes into the bladder. Because when you catheterize yourself, you don't use gloves. Us nurses, when we catheterize you, we will use gloves. But when you do this, because you catheterize in your own environment, in your home, you don't really need to use gloves. But we are trying to advance technology of these catheters so that you don't have to touch the surface.

And what we have here is some catheters that allow you to do that. So basically these catheters are embedded technology. And actually they have a satchel in here, water satchel, that when you break it, it lubricates the surface of this catheter so that the lubrication is embedded in that surface. So that's really good for these catheters. So I want to show you how you do this. I'm going to open this up because I want to show you what I was talking about as far as the no-touch. And as you can see, here's this blue thing is the sleeve. And I pulled out the catheter and I'm not touching the surface. And you can see the lubrication there. You can see that this is a coude tip. And you want, this is a standard length probably for a male patient. Okay? Because again, you guys have longer urethras.

We want to make sure that the coude tip is up towards the top. I always say up towards the head of the patient. I'm not going to touch that really nice hydrophilic coating there. And whenever you put the catheter in, of course you're going to straighten out the penis so that you straighten out some of those curves so that you don't butt up against the wall of the urethra. And you're going to put that right in. Remember, did you see that? The curve is to the top towards the head. And you can see that the curve is to the top towards the head and very nicely it'll pass through into the bladder. And you notice that even if I had a little bit of resistance there, I'm able to advance it by moving this finger grip. So this is really no-touch catheterization.

Now I want to show you also some female catheters, because we have the same technology in the shorter catheters for women. You can see that this is a shorter length. It's a GentleCath Glide catheter. We're going to activate again that fluid so that it activates the embedded technology. I don't know if you heard that. It was a little swoosh. You can see the fluid coming down. Very easily open this. And again, this has the same type of no-touch technology so that a woman can very easily pass the catheter without touching the surface of the catheter. Again, that might help with preventing urinary tract infections. So she would hold it like a pencil. It would go right into the urethra and pass very easily without touching the actual catheter surface. So, that's how you would do no-touch catheterization.