Furine Non-Invasive Faecal Management System

It can be applied straight away. Important to check the skin first but a new one can be applied straight after this.

Yes, it is possible. This can be done by taking a specimen from the bag or the tubing. It is best to do this when the bag is ready to be changed for health and safety reasons. No access tube is available specifically for this, to keep costs down. It is something that could be added in the future.

Furine does not have port to flush the system. The nurses who are using this in Denmark say this isn’t needed due to Furine having a large lumin (tubing). However, should you ever need to do this, you can manually push the faecal matter through the tube.

No, we do not recommend that Cavalon is mixed with our ABF because ours is designed to work with silicone others like Cavalon are not designed for this purpose.

The statement about 3-5 days applies to the catheter itself and not the bag. According to your earlier email, you are changing the bag daily and this is good practice. We also recommend that the entire set is replaced after 5 days if the patient is in for this long and it is necessary to do so. This is to check up on the skin status regularly. Sometimes the catheter sits so well on the skin, that the nurses may be tempted to let it stay on longer than 5 days. This is of course their decision, but our recommendation is to change it. When we say 3-5 days, it is because the catheter may fall off before 5 days have passed. If it falls off after three days, I recommend changing the entire system.

Yes, if you needed to replace the catheter, then ultimately it would increase the overall cost per patient. To the best of my knowledge (and perhaps more applicable to normal COVID-free times), the average patient stay in ICU is 3-4 days, so in many cases, one catheter should be enough for a single patient. If we are looking at the cost implications of replacing catheters, I would consider the alternatives and, if it is the invasive catheter, then using 2 x Furine catheters should still be less expensive. From what I can gather, Furine is roughly one-third the cost of an invasive catheter.

Sometimes the catheter (the flange) may begin to loosen from the skin after a day or so. This could be because the tube has been positioned so that there has been a pull on the tube. It could also be because the skin was not completely intact before the
application of the catheter, which in turn causes the skin to be moister. If moist skin is the problem, it would be difficult to get a new Furine catheter to sit well.

In the cases where the catheter has begun to detach from the skin, it is often possible to fix the area that has lost grip on the skin by applying more Adhesive Barrier Film. A catheter that has fallen off completely cannot be reused. In such a case, the skin needs to be re-
assessed to see if the cause of the detachment was moist or broken skin, in which case the External Faecal Catheter is not the right solution. If, on the other hand, the skin is intact and whole, a new External Faecal Catheter could very well be the best solution for the patient.