Before pressing and rotating the swab repeatedly over the wound surfaces, the nurse should delicately introduce the swab into the wound. The nurse should put the swab back in the culture tube after collecting the material. The nurse must take care to keep the culture tube's interior and the swab sanitary at all times.
To prevent contaminating both the swab with organisms not in the wound and the places the swab touches with organisms discovered in the wound, the nurse should avoid touching the swab to intact skin at the borders of the wound or to the outside of the tube. To avoid contaminating the culture, the nurse needs to clean the wound using a nonantimicrobial cleanser.
