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Hi it’s Patrik Hutzel from INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME where we provide tailor made solutions for long-term ventilated Adults & Children with Tracheostomies and where we also provide tailor made solutions for hospitals and Intensive Care Units whilst providing quality services for long-term ventilated patients and medically complex patients at home, including home TPN.

In last week’s blog, I talked about,

EVIDENCE-BASED! WHY TRACHEOSTOMY CLIENTS AT HOME NEED ICU/PICU NURSES 24/7! LIVE STREAM!

You can check out last week’s blog by clicking on the link below this video:

https://intensivecareathome.com/evidence-based-why-tracheostomy-clients-at-home-need-icu-picu-nurses-24-7-live-stream/

In today’s blog post, I want to answer a question from one of our clients and the question today is 

24/7 ICU Nurse for Tracheostomy Clients Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines

Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from intensivecareathome.com, where we provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomies at home instead of intensive care. And where we also provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated patients on BiPAP or on CPAP or on VPAP, as well as home TPN.

And now today, I’ve got a quick tip for you, why a tracheostomy client needs ICU nurses 24-hours a day. Not only is it evidence-based as you can find on our website at intensivecareathome.com, on our Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines that are evidence and research-based, but I also want to give you some tangible examples today. Unfortunately, some very tragic examples, but just to get my point across. So, as some of you may know, I also have a consulting and advocacy service for families in intensive care and you can find information at intensivecarehotline.com.

If you have a loved one in intensive care and you need consulting and advocacy to deal with, often difficult intensive care teams, and if you want to know and understand what your rights are, if you have clinical questions and so forth, check out intensivecarehotline.com. But let’s go back to our tip today, why you need Intensive care nurses 24-hours a day at home for a tracheostomy client with or without ventilation.

So, as part of my consulting and advocacy in intensive care, we’ve consulted a client in New Zealand actually, and he had their 44-year-old loved one on a ward, with a tracheostomy and she didn’t have 24-hour care with the intensive care nurses. And lo and behold, the tracheostomy blocked. Nobody was picking up on it and she had a respiratory arrest that led to a cardiac arrest.

And that’s exactly the point why a patient or a client with a tracheostomy, adults or children need 24-hour intensive care nursing at home or in a hospital, ideally at home, which is what we are doing here at Intensive Care at Home. And you can find more information at intensivecareathome.com.

Now, let me give you some examples from the community. So, we have been looking after tracheostomy and ventilated clients for the last 10 years, adults and pediatrics. And we’ve had clients a couple of years ago, they were only funded for night shifts and when we were leaving, the clients were left either with the support worker or with family members. And we made it very clear to the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) at that time that those clients’ lives are in danger when the intensive care nurse leaves. And we were laughed at, we were said, “Oh, we just wanted to promote the business and so forth”. Now, we are clinicians and we are taking our job very serious and we are providing evidence-based care.

And again, if you go back to our website at intensivecareathome.com, if you look at the evidence-based Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines, you will see that this research-based paper clearly, not suggests, demands Intensive care nurses 24-hours a day with a minimum of two years ICU or pediatric ICU experience.

Coming back to our clients, they passed away just as we predicted, during the day when we were not there with medical emergencies that couldn’t be managed by support workers or by family members. And it’s very tragic. One of them was a 5-year-old and one of them was a 17-year-old. And it’s just tragic beyond words that the NDIS at that stage was not funding what is clinically necessary, clinically appropriate, and evidence-based.

But even worse probably, that some service providers would just send support workers and put them in danger as well and wouldn’t teach them what to do. And you can’t teach a support worker or even a general registered nurse what to do with a tracheostomy unless you’ve worked in ICU for a minimum of two years.

And this is also a video for any NDIS support coordinator, or specialist support coordinator that doesn’t know what to do with a tracheostomy client, or with a ventilated client. Please contact us at intensivecareathome.com and we can help you with the advocacy for families and clients for the NDIS or for any other funding body for that matter.

So that’s my quick tip for today.

If you have a loved one in intensive care and you want to go home, check out intensivecareathome.com or simply send us an email to [email protected] or simply call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website.

Also, if you are at home already, and you are in a situation where you don’t have enough funding, if your loved one is at home on a ventilator and bounces back to ICU, or you are worried that yourself or support workers or general registered nurses can’t look after someone with a tracheostomy and they really can’t, you should contact us as well. And we can help you with taking the next steps towards getting the ICU nurses.

Also, have a look at our membership for families in intensive care at intensivecaresupport.org. If you need a medical record review for your loved one or for yourself while they are in intensive care or after Intensive care, contact us as well.

Now, if you like this video, give it a thumbs up, share the video with your friends and families, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families in intensive care or for Intensive Care at Home. Comment below what you want to see next, or what questions and insights you have, and click the notification bell so you get regular updates here.

Thanks for watching.

This is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecareathome.com and I will talk to you in a few days.