1. Rotate your injection sites. Consider legs and arms for long-acting injections and tummy injections for short-acting.
2. Try not to keep using the same places to avoid building up scar-tissue. With modern needles it can be hard to see a puncture mark as to where your last injection was put, so you might need to come up with a strategy – like to start ‘top left tummy’ for the morning, ‘lower left tummy’ for lunchtime, ‘lower right tummy’ for tea time, and ‘upper right tummy’ for night-time (amend this around your own timings/types of insulin taken. This is a literal rotation, going in a circle around your tum-tum, and might help avoid repetition of spots that are just the easiest to reach.
3. Use new needles if not for each injection, then daily. Get into the habit and avoid ‘I only change my needle when it starts to hurt’ behaviour, and do your skin a favour. Being blunt about it, blunt needles hurt, so stick on a new one.
4. Avoid using creams and oils on skin before you need to change an infusion set, as that will stop them sticking to the skin. It’s fine to use them on skin after the infusion set has been removed though, if you start to get irritation on your skin, don’t doubt on contacting dermatology specialist.
5. Once in a while take the time to review your injection technique. Read up on best practice on this site from BD: http://bit.ly/injection_technique
