Hey everyone, Doc Miles, North American Rescue. Let's talk about access options for how to get fluids, blood, or medication into your patient.

Really, there's two main options. If we want to do any sort of volume of medication or fluids into your patients.

Intravenous Access

The first one is intravenous access. So in intravenous access, what I'm doing is I'm taking an IV catheter, which is a plastic catheter that's placed over a sharp needle. That sharp needle goes into the vein along with the catheter. Then the catheter gets thread into the vein. And left in place, which you can see that I've done here. So I've got flow into the peripheral or the outer venous system, which then connects to larger veins and returns to the heart. That way I can successfully administer medication. I can give blood. I can give IV fluids all through that line.

Intraosseous Access

The other option is intraosseous access. And basically what we do in that is we take a sharp needle.

We drill it into the bone and then from that bone in the inner cavity or the medullary cavity There are feeder veins that come off of that bone and they drain into the rest of the vascular system, go into the central venous system, and back to the heart, thereby being able to deliver medication, fluids, and blood.

All through that access, this is particularly handy if you're having difficulty getting intravenous access. So if the patient's low on volume, maybe they've got a lot of fat subcutaneous fat that makes it difficult to get to the vein, then you can always go into the bone. So what I have here is an EZ-IO intraosseous needle.

So this is designed to be able to drill into the bone. The outer portion is the catheter portion, and that stays in place. We unscrew the middle portion, which was used to drill in, and then now I'm able to get fluid into the middle of that bone, which then returns to the venous system. So what I've done here is I've drilled the EZIO into the proximal tibia, right into the center of it.

Then I'm able to administer medication in through here, which goes into the rest of the bone through those little feeder veins that connect and eventually get back to the heart to get to your central circulatory system. So that's two different methods of being able to access the inside of your patient's circulatory system to administer fluid, medication, or blood products when needed.