Gastroscope Troubleshooting Video

So you’re going to use your gastroscope and you find that the air water button providing air or water inside the patient. So we’re going to do some troubleshooting here. We’re going to start with the simplest things. The first thing I’d like to start with is looking at the water bottle. There’s a gasket and there’s a o-ring that we want to make sure is in place and doing its job to pressurize the water bottle. So the first thing I would check is make sure you have a black or red o-ring on the tip of the water bottle insert.

If that’s there and that’s a good thing. Next is unscrew the water bottle. And you’re looking for a plastic gasket and you can tell if it’s there, you can use a tummy pressure or something like that. See if it’s there and you can pop it out.

And it’s going to look like this. And sometimes these get lost. If that’s the case, this is a really easy fix. We can send you one of these. If you’re missing the O-ring, you have a bag of probably five of them in your gastroscope case. They would be the smallest o-ring in that case. So let’s start there. These are the simplest fixes.

Okay, now that we’ve confirmed it’s not the water bottle, we’re going to check for some other high frequency issues with the air and water button. So to make sure we’re on the same page, I’m talking about this blue button here, the air water button. And when you’re putting your finger over it just for air, or you’re pressing it and holding it down, water is not coming out of the distal end of the scope. So these are some of the things we’re going to do to see if it’s a clog and then try to fix the clock. The first thing I would have you do is using only distilled water is soak the distal end of the scope and distilled water for 20 to 30 minutes to soften up any remnants from a patient that might be in there causing a clot.

After that, to make sure that there’s no chance of getting the sensitive wiring damage, please put your watertight cap on it. And make sure it’s locked in place. Next one we’re going to have to do is we are going to flush the gastroscope. So we’re going to use pressure via a 60cc syringe and a few adapters that came with your scope to flush out the scope. So the first thing I’d like you to do is take off the red and blue buttons.

The suction button and the air water button and put those to the side. And each one of your gastroscope cases should have a channel blocker. That looks like this. It doesn’t have any tubing on it. There is a different level of tubing. And the channel blocker has two different size cones to block the channel. This suction channel in this air water channel. So you squeeze it down and it’s a pretty simple insert. You make sure it’s nice and tight. Next what we’re going to do is we’re going to block all the channels that we don’t want water coming out of.

So this is one, this hose barb where you typically put your suction on. And this very small button channel on top. Those are the only two channels we need to block. We’ve got water coming out and your cases come with some caps. 

So please make sure you put the caps on. And if you don’t have those caps, we can certainly provide more for you. So there’s a very small cap on top. And one on the side. Now, if you’re like many hospitals, you might have misplaced the calves. That’s perfectly fine. You’re going to need a colleague so that they can block these channels with their fingers. And that is just fine. That’ll do the same thing.

The next thing we’re going to do is we are going to take this channel flush. Component and we’re going to insert that where you put the water bottle. So just like the water bottle would be putting water into the scope, you’re going to put the flush connector into the scope.

Next, you’re going to take a 60cc syringe that you should all have in your hospital that screws into this flush connector. And you are going to draw water, distilled water out from where you were just soaking the scope.

You’re going to connect the syringe to the flush channel connector. And then you were going to use your pressure to force out any blockage in the scope. If you receive any type of significant resistance, meaning you can’t just do it with one finger, then you likely have a blockage and that’s what this is going to address by pressurizing this flush connector, you’re going to force water through the entire scope from the beginning to the end to try to unclog the clog anywhere in the scope. Now when it’s done and you can see water coming out of the distal end, water doesn’t shoot straight out.

It shoots at a right angle. So that is perfectly normal. If you’re seeing it come out as a right angle, you have fixed the clock. So that’s what I would recommend when you’re seeing your air water button not working with your scope.