How to Apply a Hip Sling

Video Transcript

"My name is Alv Rios and I am a paramedic with Lansing Mercy Ambulance on behalf of Expert Village. In this clip we are going to go over the splinting of a fracture to the hip. This will be my partner Jacob Barber. He is going to help assist me through this. He also works with me as a paramedic for Lansing Mercy Ambulance and he will be doing this on behalf of Expert Village. When dealing with a hip fracture it's important to know that this is very painful and there's really no good way to go about taking care of it at first. There is a lot of things we can do to help minimize the pain but a hip fracture is very painful and can be a major life threat because your pelvis can actually hold up to two thousand milliliters of blood which is enough to put most people in shock. And they can die from it. So it is very important to take care or treat effectively. When you come up to a hip fracture there is multiple ways to first determine how you are going to take care of it. What we are going to use is a sheet. The goal of what I want to do with the sheet is I would like to get the sheet underneath the patient in this area right here. I want to get it so I can tie it around his hips and pull it in place which is going to help support the pelvis in case there is any instability. That way pieces aren't moving around causing excessive pain. The problem coming into this is you can have the injury in different spots. If it is located to one side then normally the foot will be, the leg will be shorter or it will look a little bit longer and the foot will be rotated different and the pain will be isolated to just one side. If that is the case and the injury is only to his right side what we want to have is more people to help with the roll. Let the patient know this is not going to be comfortable and it's going to cause pain. We are going to do this so we can help them in the long run. We want someone dedicated to just stabilizing the leg so it does as little movement as possible. What you want to do is get a sheet read to go at the time and you would do this by having as much as you want over there and just bundling up the rest right here. What you then want to do is you are then going to roll the patient onto his side. We can roll this way for the sake of this clip. What you want to do is while still stabilizing the best you can get this into position and roll him back nice and easy. What you now have done is gotten the sheet to the other side. Another way of doing it is you can actually lift the patient up if you have enough people to support. Again this is going to cause pain but this is going to be the best you can do. So we are actually going to lift you up for a second and move you over to the side for the sake of showing what we would do if we lifted you. There we are. So once we have him centered on our sheet we have lifted and moved the patient where we want. Normally we will do this right to the stretcher and have a sheet ready to go. What we then want to do is get the sheet and what you are going to is tell the patient that I am going to start pulling and I want you to let me know if this makes the pain any worse but I also want you to let me know if this makes it any relief. You want a second partner to come and grab the sheet slowly pull them together. Then while he pulls that you are going at the same time when you work it together do one fluid movement and try to tie the hips in place. What this now has created is a spot where you can actually help lift the hips while other people lift. But more importantly it's going to keep the pelvis together and stable."