Hello and welcome to another Intensive Care at Home live stream. Welcome to the show. My name is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecareathome.com and today’s title of the live stream is: I can no longer take care of my son at home if he gets a tracheostomy and ventilator — help.

We will talk about today’s question and topic for around 45 minutes. That will give you time to watch the presentation and ask any questions you have. You can type your questions in the chatpad or you can connect with me live on the StreamYard link if we have enough time to talk directly.

I also want to welcome our viewers on replay, because I know we have a lot of viewers on replay as well. Thank you for being here live or on replay. Drop in the comments where you are watching from today — I know we have an international audience here. Whilst most of you are in Australia, I know we have people watching from the US (United States), Canada, India, UK (United Kingdom), Ireland, and all around the world.

This is a live stream, so please use the comments. I will be reading them out and answering as many as I can throughout the next 45 minutes. If you are new here, hit subscribe and tap the bell so you get notified every time I go live or post another video, because these conversations happen every single week and almost every single day. If what I say today resonates with you, please share this live stream with another family who needs to hear it. That is genuinely how we reach the people who need this information the most.

Today’s topic comes from a question I get more than almost any other, and today it is framed exactly like this: I can no longer take care of my son at home if he gets a tracheostomy and ventilator — help.

If that is you or your family right now — if you are sitting in a hospital corridor or at home with a discharge date looming and you are genuinely terrified that you cannot physically or emotionally do this — I want you to stay with me for the next 45 minutes. By the end of today’s live, you are going to understand exactly what is involved, why what you are feeling is completely valid, and exactly what your options are. We will also talk about whether a tracheostomy would even be the right choice for your son or for any family member in your situation.

In the comments, tell me: is this you right now, or has this been you in the past? Are you a parent, a partner, an adult child, or a sibling? I want to know who is in the room with me today.

Before we go further, I also want to talk about what we do here at intensivecareathome.com so that you understand why we talk about today’s topic so vividly.

At intensivecareathome.com, we provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomies at home. We provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated adults and children on BiPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure) and CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) ventilation at home. We provide tracheostomy care without ventilation at home for adults and for children. We provide home cough assist management, home ventilation and home tracheostomy weaning whenever medically indicated. We provide home TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition), home IV fluids, home IV antibiotics, home IV potassium and magnesium and other electrolyte infusions — that goes hand in hand with central line, PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) line, Hickman’s line as well as port management at home. We also provide PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy) and PEJ (Percutaneous Endoscopic Jejunostomy) tube, nasogastric and nasojejunostomy tube management at home, as well as SPC (Suprapubic Catheter) and IDC (Indwelling Catheter) management at home. We also provide palliative care services at home if that is your choice, and we provide Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) support coordination as well as TAC (Transport Accident Commission) and WorkSafe case management.

What a Tracheostomy and Home Ventilation Actually Means

Let’s start with the clinical picture, because I think a lot of families are told they will get a tracheostomy and go home on a ventilator almost like it is a simple thing — or they may not even get offered a tracheostomy in the first place, because ICUs (Intensive Care Units) might be saying: if he has a tracheostomy and continues to be ventilated, he will not have any quality of life. Or you might hear things like: if your family member gets a tracheostomy, it will be futile. The term futile or futility stands for of no perceived benefit for a patient. But again, it is a perception. Is that matching reality? More importantly, is that matching your reality and your family member’s reality?

If you are proceeding with a tracheostomy and/or ventilator, what that basically means for your loved one to be managed at home is functionally an ICU bed at home inside your living room or your son’s living room or bedroom.

Let me break down what that actually involves minute by minute. We have helped so many families work through this and provide the care and get the funding that is needed for patients like this. These are real questions from real people and I am talking from experience. We have helped many families who were quite desperate — they could not look after a ventilator at home, could not look after a tracheostomy at home — where we enabled them to go home with 24-hour intensive care nursing, replicating that ICU bed at home with a good quality of life, community access, and a lot of safety.

What that actually involves minute to minute:

Number one: Continuous monitoring — oxygen saturation, heart rate, ventilator pressures and volumes, and tracheostomy — 24 hours a day, every single day, with zero days off.

Number two: Suctioning the tracheostomy tube, giving nebulizers — sometimes every few minutes when secretions are heavy — to stop the airway from blocking. It also means changing an inner cannula quite frequently if an inner cannula is present.

Number three: Recognising instantly the difference between a routine alarm and a tracheostomy tube displacement or airway blockage, because with a compromised airway, seconds and minutes matter enormously.

Number four: Our staff are trained and confident enough to perform scheduled tracheostomy tube changes, but also to prevent or perform emergency tracheostomy changes if really needed — for example, if the tube comes out or if the tube is blocked. That is a critical care nursing skill only.

Number five: Humidification of the ventilator or the tracheostomy, tracheostomy cough management, circuit changes, and infection control around an open airway.

This is also exactly why we publish our evidence-based Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines, which you can read in full at intensivecareathome.com — I will put a link to the show notes. They set out, based on clinical evidence and best practice, what safe home ventilation actually requires. And it is not a general registered nurse without ICU experience. It is definitely not a support worker with a short competency online sign-off. It is 24-hour critical care registered nurses.

If you have already been told what your care model will look like — family only, support workers, or nurses — drop that in the comments. I want to see what families are actually being offered right now.

Why Families Reach Breaking Point

Before I go further into this topic, let me tell you what actually makes me qualified to talk about today’s topic. My name is Patrik Hutzel. I have been working in critical care nursing for over 25 years in three different countries, where I worked as a nurse manager for over five years in intensive care. I was part of successfully setting up intensive care at home nursing in Germany in the early 2000s — a pioneering service there, Brambring and Jaschke in Munich. Big shout out to Jürgen and Kristof here. I went on traveling and I brought the concept of Intensive Care at Home to Australia in 2012, inspired by having successfully set up Intensive Care at Home in Germany. I brought the concept to Australia in 2012 after I worked in intensive care prior to that in Australia and in the UK, seeing a massive gap in this market — knowing full well that there were patients in ICU in the UK, in Australia, and in other countries that we would have looked after at home in Germany, and that is what we are doing right now in Australia. We are looking after long-term ICU patients at home as a genuine alternative to a long-term stay in intensive care.

Right now in 2026, Intensive Care at Home is the only third-party accredited and NDIS registered service in Australia for intensive care at home nursing. There is no other service in Australia that has developed the policies, the procedures, and the intellectual property from scratch to allow them and enable them to be third-party accredited and NDIS registered for intensive care at home nursing.

I also run a consulting and advocacy service for families in intensive care at intensivecarehotline.com, and you can find more information there.

Now let’s go back to why families reach breaking point — and that means going back to the actual title of today’s live: I can no longer take care of my son at home if he has a ventilator and tracheostomy.

We have quite a number of clients at home with cerebral palsy, with MND (Motor Neurone Disease) and other neurodegenerative progressive diseases. Some of those clients may have been okay with DSWs (Disability Support Workers) or family support, but unfortunately, because those conditions are degenerative in nature, patients deteriorate. They end up in hospitals, they end up in ICU, they end up with chest infections, they may have more seizures, and then they need a review of their overall care and medications. These often go hand in hand with prolonged hospital and ICU admissions, and that is when families realize that things change — and change rapidly — in terms of their family member’s care needs. If those care needs change because they are now having a ventilator, a tracheostomy, or both, that is a big ask.

But I want to say this as plainly as I can: that is not a failure of love. If you feel that way, that is not you giving up. What you are describing is chronic sleep deprivation, hypervigilance 24 hours a day, isolation, and the physical and emotional toll of doing a job that would exhaust a full ICU nursing team working 24/7 shifts — which is pretty much what we are doing here at Intensive Care at Home — except you are doing it completely alone with no shift change, no handover, and often without formal training in ventilation, tracheostomy, and emergency airway management, which is not even the skill of a general registered nurse. It is the skill of an intensive care registered nurse.

I have spoken to hundreds of families in exactly this position over the last 25 years of critical care nursing in Germany, the UK, and here in Australia. Every single one of them loved their child fiercely. None of them were failing. They were being asked to do the impossible — to substitute for a trained ICU nursing team on their own, indefinitely. That is not sustainable. It is not safe for your son or for you.

The Case of Noah Johnston

To illustrate this further, I want to talk about a case that I think about often and that I believe every family and every funding decision maker needs to sit with — and that is Noah Johnston.

Noah was one of our clients in Sydney and we looked after Noah for a number of years, initially with 24-hour nursing care funded by the NDIS. All the evidence was there. It was crystal clear that the only way to keep Noah safe was with 24-hour critical care registered nurses. Noah had cerebral palsy. He was ventilated with a tracheostomy. He was only 22 years of age at the time of his death.

The NDIS decided one day to cut Noah’s 24-hour nursing to 12 hours of nursing a day. We and the family highlighted to the NDIA (National Disability Insurance Agency) that if they did that, Noah would die when a nurse was not present.

Unfortunately, our predictions became a reality very quickly, because Noah’s tracheostomy tube became displaced on 8 December 2025 and he passed away in no time, because family or disability support workers could not recognize the medical emergency that was happening — and because at that moment there was no critical care registered nurse present, Noah died.

I have made videos about Noah’s case and written about it in detail on our website, including about the independent clinical evidence confirming that Noah needed 24-hour critical care registered nursing support — evidence that aligns exactly with our evidence-based Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines that you can find on our website at intensivecareathome.com.

Whether it is tracheostomy or ventilation, you need a 24-hour critical care registered nurse at home, similar to an ICU environment. Why would it be any different? What makes any funding body think that if you need ICU nurses 24 hours a day in an ICU for ventilated tracheostomy patients, that in a home care environment you can take shortcuts? What makes the NDIA think that? What makes other funding bodies think there can be shortcuts taken? It cost Noah’s life — but it also cost other people’s lives where families have decided not to speak up publicly. In Noah’s case, his mom decided to speak publicly to the media to highlight these systemic failures and to hold the NDIA responsible and accountable.

Had there been a critical care registered nurse in the room trained in emergency reestablishment of the airway, Noah would still be alive, because that is a manageable clinical event for a critical care nurse. Without that level of ICU nursing present, it can be fatal within minutes — which is exactly what happened with Noah, and which is also something we pointed out to the NDIA the minute they decided to cut 12 hours a day of critical care nursing.

I do not share this to frighten you. I share it because you deserve to know exactly what is at stake before you agree to a care model that downgrades from 24/7 ICU critical care registered nurses to general registered nurses at home or disability support workers. This is precisely why the guidelines exist. This is precisely why the evidence exists, and it is also precisely why third-party accreditation, NDIS registration, and clinical governance in this sector matter so much.

If you want to read more or watch more on Noah’s case and the guidelines behind it, the links are in the show notes when this video goes on our website. You can also go to our website at intensivecareathome.com, use the search box, and type in Noah Johnston — or you can even type into Google “Noah Johnston Intensive Care at Home.”

Third-Party Accreditation: Why It Matters

Here is a question I want every single one of you to start asking any homecare provider you are considering: who independently checks that this service is third-party accredited and therefore safe? Because when people put on their website “trust us,” that is not good enough when it is your son’s airway on the line when your son is meant to go home from intensive care.

Intensive Care at Home in 2026 is currently the only third-party accredited Intensive Care at Home nursing service and specialist home intensive care nursing provider in Australia, accredited to ISO 9001:2015 as well as NDIS registered. That means independent bodies have reviewed our clinical governance, our incident management systems, our staff competency framework, and our quality processes, and confirmed they meet a recognized national and international standard. That means we have built the intellectual property, the policies, and the procedures from scratch. You can see exactly what that third-party accreditation covers when you go to our website at intensivecareathome.com/accreditation-quality.

This is not a badge on a website. It is the difference between a provider that has been independently checked — that has also spent the money and invested the resources to get to that point — and one that is simply telling you that they are good.

A Recent Case Example

We had a client inquiry a few months ago where the question was also about whether a patient should have a tracheostomy. The patient was in ICU on a prolonged stay, and the ICU was actually telling the family that the NDIS would not fund 24-hour nursing for tracheostomy. We got involved early on. We told the hospital at the time that of course that is what the NDIS will tell you if you ask them, but at no point had the hospital provided evidence to the NDIS about what is at stake and what is needed clinically. We got involved, and we managed to take the patient home with NDIS funding. There is nothing here that we cannot make happen. We have also shown hospitals that we can help them free up their ICU beds.

You should not be scared about whether a tracheostomy is the right decision, because the care models are there — like Intensive Care at Home. The funding is there. It is just a case of providing the right evidence and working through that step by step.

Questions and Answers

Elena says: “I was repeatedly forced to make life and death decisions based on uniform concepts, lies, and deceptive information.”

That is how hospitals can operate. They give you artificial deadlines. Do not work with hospitals’ artificial deadlines. Work with your own deadlines and never give in. You know what is right for you and your family. You now know the solution here with Intensive Care at Home. Just work with that. Do not work with hospitals’ artificial deadlines — that is never a good use of your time.

Question: Can my son really be cared for at home with a tracheostomy and a ventilator?

Yes, absolutely — but only with the right level of 24-hour critical care nursing, similar to an ICU. Our evidence-based Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines are clear. Safe, sustainable home ventilation for a tracheostomy-dependent child or adult needs 24/7 critical care registered nurses similar to an ICU environment — not family alone, not general registered nurses, and definitely not general support workers.

Besides the Noah Johnston preventable death I talked about earlier, I have also lodged incidents directly with the NDIA where the NDIA was refusing to fund 24-hour nursing care even though the evidence was provided to them that 24-hour nursing care is needed. When they did not fund those clients, they also passed away. I cannot mention any names here because the families have chosen not to speak up publicly, but these things have happened, and unfortunately decision makers at the NDIA need to pay attention before more people die. The good news is that as a family, you can put a lot of pressure on the NDIA. We have seen over and over again that pressure by advocates, pressure by families, and pressure by health professionals will get the NDIS to comply — especially when all the evidence is there.

What is the evidence? The evidence includes doctor’s letters, nursing reports, OT (Occupational Therapy) reports such as FCA (Functional Capacity Assessments), physiotherapy reports, as well as speech therapy reports — and all of them need to confirm that a particular client needs 24-hour nursing care. If someone is on a ventilator with or without a tracheostomy, you do not need to make that up. That is a reality. It is evidence-based.

Question: What is actually the difference between a support worker and a critical care registered nurse?

A support worker usually has a short in-house competency training on specific tasks. A critical care registered nurse brings ICU or paediatric ICU clinical experience or ED (Emergency Department) experience — recognizing deterioration before it becomes an emergency and acting immediately on airway complications like a displaced or blocked tracheostomy tube. That is exactly the gap in Noah Johnston’s case.

Also keep in mind that in order to work as a critical care registered nurse, you need to go through basic nursing training, which takes three or four years at university. Then you need to have worked in ICU for a minimum of two years. During that time, you might work towards a postgraduate critical care nursing qualification, which is very important in the intensive care nursing field, whether it is intensive care in a hospital or Intensive Care at Home. Fifty to 75% of our nurses have completed a postgraduate critical care nursing qualification, similar to an ICU. Most ICUs require at least 50% of their nurses to hold a postgraduate critical care nursing qualification. It is the same here — that really keeps the standards very high.

A disability support worker, with all respect, might have worked at a supermarket the week before and is now doing some training that takes a critical care registered nurse five years to complete and they are not even giving disability support workers five days. They might run an online module — an e-module as they call it these days — instead of hands-on nursing training and specialization in ICU. If the NDIS or other funding bodies think we can use disability support workers in the community for basically ICU patients, why can we not use disability support workers in ICU? Please answer that question and leave your comments.

Question: Is it normal to feel like I can’t do this on my own?

Absolutely. This is completely normal. What you are being asked to do would exhaust a rostered ICU nursing team, and you are doing it alone with no shift change and nobody coming in to relieve you. Needing a properly staffed clinical team is not giving up. It is what keeps your son and your family safe.

Question: Will the NDIS or other funding bodies actually fund 24/7 critical care registered nurses?

Funded supports under the NDIS or most funding bodies must be reasonable, necessary, and based on clinical evidence. Independent clinical reports confirming 24-hour CCRN (Critical Care Registered Nurse) level needs, cross-referenced against evidence-based guidelines — for example, the Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines — is exactly the documentation that supports that funding. This is exactly what our Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS support coordinators help families build and present. We have also done the advocacy for other clients, whether it is iCare, DVA (Department of Veterans’ Affairs), or any other funding bodies.

Question: What if this is not NDIS? It is a car accident, a workplace injury, or something else.

Then if you are in the state of Victoria, it might be TAC or WorkSafe. It might be iCare New South Wales or NIISQ (National Injury Insurance Scheme Queensland) in Queensland. We provide case management for both, so your son’s clinical needs and his funding pathways are handled by one team who understands both sides.

Building Your Evidence and Navigating Funding

Let me start with the bigger picture. Your family member — your son, your spouse, whoever it is — is in ICU right now. An ICU bed costs $5,000 to $10,000 per bed day. It does not matter whether you are in Australia, in the US, or in the UK — you can do the maths. A funding body — whether it is NDIS, TAC, WorkSafe, private health funds, DVA, or any other — has an interest in cutting that cost by about 50%, because that is what we do at Intensive Care at Home. We are approximately cutting the cost of the intensive care bed by 50%. Do you think a funding body has an interest in that? Of course they do. And as a family, you want to go home, your quality of life is improving for you and your family member, and the ICU wants to free up the bed.

What that means is they want to free up the bed either by providing the care your family member needs and sending them home as quickly as possible safely — so that they can free up the ICU bed — or unfortunately on the other end of the spectrum, they may want to free up the bed by offering end of life care only and suggesting to withdraw treatment, because the ICU might say your family member will not have any quality of life. Well, what is quality of life? It is a very subjective measure, not an objective measure. It is up to you to decide what quality of life is acceptable for you and your family. A lot of families are telling me — and telling ICUs — that they value life over quality of life. It is a different perspective that you can use if you think it helps you in your arguments with hospitals or with funding bodies.

Funding conversations are not as difficult as you think they are, because once again we are cutting the cost of an ICU bed by 50%. Someone will have an interest in that. And if they want to let your loved one die, please reach out to us for advocacy. I have also been running intensivecarehotline.com — an advocacy service for intensive care families — where we have quite literally saved many lives over many years.

The single most powerful thing you can do when talking to funding bodies — the NDIS, WorkSafe, hospital discharge planners, departments of health, private health funds, DVA, you name it — is build an independent, evidence-based paper trail. Get your son’s full medical records. Ask his treating specialist to put in writing exactly what level of nursing support is clinically required and cross-reference that against our evidence-based Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines. Do not accept anything less.

If you are taking a shortcut by not having 24-hour ICU nursing at home when it comes to ventilation and tracheostomy, you are almost signing up for a death sentence. Keep that in mind. There is enough evidence — not only the Noah Johnston case but other families too that I have highlighted earlier.

If your son’s or your family member’s care sits under the NDIS, we provide Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS support coordination specifically to help families connect that clinical evidence to the funding decision it should be driving. And if his situation relates to a transport accident or workplace injury, we also provide TAC and WorkSafe case management. So the clinical picture and the funding pathway are being managed by one team who genuinely understands both.

If you are currently going through an NDIS planning meeting, a TAC claim, a WorkSafe case, a DVA case, or any other case with a hospital, departments of health, or private health funds, and you feel like nobody is listening to the clinical reality — tell me in the comments. More importantly, reach out to us to help you with that. You do not have to fight this alone.

We are here all the way with you. We have been doing this since 2012. We had to create funding out of thin air. We are not like all these NDIS companies that are coming in now. I never started Intensive Care at Home because of the NDIS. I had no idea in 2012 that the NDIS would be a thing one day. I started it because I believe there is a need for what we do. I had no idea who would be paying for it, but I knew somebody would.

How I Can Help You Directly

If everything I said today is exactly your situation right now, please do not try to work this out alone. I can help you. Me and my team can help you by you going to intensivecareathome.com. Call me on one of the numbers on the top of our website, or click the Schedule Appointment button to book a call with me, or you can also send me an email to [email protected]. If you are in Australia, call me directly on my mobile on 0410 942 230 — that is again 0410 942 230. If you are in the US, in the UK, in Canada, or in India and you want Intensive Care at Home, please reach out to us as well. We can help you there too. We have international phone numbers on our website as well.

Our Core Promise

Beyond everything I have said, it always comes back to our core promise. Intensive Care at Home provides 24/7 critical care registered nursing for your son 24 hours a day, long-term, for:

• Invasive ventilation with tracheostomy
• Non-invasive ventilation without tracheostomy
• Tracheostomy care without ventilation — all for adults and children
• Home cough assist management
• Home ventilation and home tracheostomy weaning whenever clinically and medically indicated
• Home TPN, home IV fluids, IV antibiotics, potassium, magnesium infusions, and other electrolyte infusions at home
• Central line, PICC line, Hickman’s line, and port management at home

We employ hundreds of years of critical care nursing experience combined, which enables us to look after the highest acuity clients safely in the community. Intensive Care at Home operates all around Australia in all states and territories, in all major capital cities, and in regional and remote areas. We can hire staff wherever you are.

This is what a genuinely safe, sustainable homecare model looks like — not one exhausted family doing the job of a shift-rostered ICU team on their own, but a properly resourced 24/7 ICU clinical team giving your son ICU-level care at home.

That is the bottom line, and I want you to hear this before you go: you are allowed to say I cannot do this alone. In fact, if you do this alone, chances are your family member is dying. That is not giving up on your son. That is making sure he gets the level of care that keeps him alive and safe and that your whole family survives this as well.

Final Questions

Thank you all so much for joining me live today. If this helped you, please like, comment, subscribe, and share this with another family who needs it.

Question: Patrik, please explain what excessive IV fluids overload manipulation can cause or induce — bolus versus non-bolus.

Excessive IV fluid overload could cause pulmonary edema, for example. It could also cause tissue swelling.

Comment: “In October 2012, I was subjected to changing my models directly from resuscitate to do not resuscitate for the purpose of covering.”

Nobody can force you to sign a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) or an NFR (Not For Resuscitation). Nobody can force you. Keep that in mind at all times.

Thank you so much for watching. Like, comment, subscribe, and share. Leave your comments so I know what content you want me to create.

 

With all of that said, with Intensive Care at Home, we are currently sending our critical care nurses into the home 24 hours a day. Therefore, we are providing a genuine alternative to long-term stay in intensive care for:

• Ventilation
• Tracheostomy
• Home BiPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure) and CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure)
• Tracheostomy care without ventilation
• home TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition)
• Home IV potassium
• Home IV magnesium
• Home IV antibiotics
• Home IV fluids

We’re providing:

• Cough assist management at home
• Ventilation weaning management at home
• central line, PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) line, Hickman’s line as well as port management at home
• nasogastric tube, nasojejunostomy tube, PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy), PEJ (Percutaneous Endoscopic Jejunostomy) tube management at home
• IDC (Indwelling Catheter) and SPC (Suprapubic Catheter) management at home
• Palliative care services at home

We’re also sending our critical care nurses into the home for emergency department bypass services. We have done so successfully as part of the Western Sydney Local Health District’s In Touch program, saving approximately $2,000 per patient that we keep at home instead of them going into an emergency department.

That also means we’re in a position to cut the cost of an ICU bed by around 50%. An intensive care bed costs between $5,000 to $10,000 per bed day depending on location. Intensive Care at Home costs approximately 50% of that, and we’re freeing up the most sought-after bed in the hospital, which is the ICU bed. Most importantly, we’re improving the quality of life for patients and their families, which is a win-win situation for all stakeholders.

Our Coverage and Accreditation

With Intensive Care at Home, we’re currently operating all around Australia, in all major capital cities, as well as in all regional and rural areas. We are an NDIS approved service provider all around Australia, TAC (Transport Accident Commission) and WorkSafe in Victoria as well as the Department of Veterans Affairs all around Australia.

We’re also ISO 9001:2015 accredited. Our clients and we as a service provider have also received funding through public hospitals, private health funds as well as departments of health.

We are the only service provider in Australia that has achieved third-party accreditation for Intensive Care at Home nursing in 2025. We have been achieving this high level of accreditation since 2012. No other provider in Australia has achieved the Intensive Care at Home level of accreditation in the community and has created more intellectual property when it comes to Intensive Care at Home nursing than we have.

This puts us in a position to employ hundreds of years of critical care nursing experience combined in the community. No other service provider in 2025 employs a higher skill level in the community than we do. And that enables us to look after the highest acuity adults and children in the community in Australia safely.

If You Need Help

If you’re at home already and you’re watching this or you’re stuck in an ICU and you realize that you don’t have the right level of support, I can give you many examples where we helped clients with funding, how we advocate for funding. We had to advocate successfully for funding from our first case study to many other case studies where we had to advocate successfully for funding with the right evidence of course because it is crystal clear that disability support workers for example or registered nurses without ICU experience cannot look after ventilated clients at home whether adults or children with or without a tracheostomy and it’s simply dangerous and negligent.

There are plenty of examples where clients with support worker models or even RN (registered nurse) models without ICU experience have died at home and I have evidence to back up everything that I’m saying here because it’s a bit like flying the airplane with a cabin crew instead of the pilot and it could simply be deadly.

This can be avoided by having simply 24-hour critical care nurses at home because our clients are at high risk of medical emergencies or worse without critical care nurses 24 hours. This is actually also evidence-based in the community and is documented in our evidence-based Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines on our website at intensivecareathome.com.

Think about it: in an intensive care unit in a hospital, you wouldn’t have support workers or general registered nurses looking after a critical care patient on a ventilator with a tracheostomy. So why would anyone in their right mind do that in a home care environment where there are fewer resources?

Clients that have found us have been at home long-term predictably and permanently with critical care nurses. Their alternative would have been to either die or stay in ICU long-term, and our clients don’t go back to ICU. They stay at home permanently and predictably and the insurance bodies save half of the cost of an ICU. But it’s a win-win situation all around.

We can do the same for you if you’re stuck in ICU or if you’re not safe at home, which includes the advocacy for funding and the network that goes along with it. We have always successfully advocated for our clients or we have the network to successfully advocate for you and for your family member, otherwise we wouldn’t be in business. The same again is applicable for those stuck in an ICU which is similar to many of our, if not most of our cases.

Our Support Coordination Services

This is also why we are providing Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS support coordination. We have a team of experienced NDIS support coordinators, and they have a wealth of knowledge. We’re also providing TAC case management and WorkSafe case management in Victoria with Lucy McCotter.

If you’re an NDIS support coordinator or a case manager or a social worker from another organization or a hospital watching this and you’re looking for nursing care for your participants, please reach out to us as well. If you’re looking for funding for nursing care for your participants and you don’t know how to go about it and how to advocate for it, what evidence to provide, I encourage you to reach out to us as well. We have the network to make that happen. We will help you with the right level of funding and with the right level of advocacy.

We’re also providing NDIS specialist nursing assessments done by critical care nurses with a legal nurse consulting background.

Join Our Team

If you are a critical care nurse and you’re looking for a career change and you want to join a very progressive, dynamic, successful, and high-performing team of critical care nurses in the community, we are employing hundreds of years of critical care nursing experience combined.

If you’re looking for a career change, we’re currently hiring for jobs for critical care nurses in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Albury-Wodonga, Bendigo, Geelong, Warragul, and also in Wyelangta in Victoria.

If you have worked in critical care nursing for a minimum of two years, adult ICU, pediatric ICU, ED and you have already completed a postgraduate critical care nursing qualification, we will be absolutely delighted hearing from you.

I have a disclaimer though: Because we are offering tailor-made solutions for our clients which includes regular staff, our clients do also want the same staff coming over and over again because they are so vulnerable and so special. That’s why we need regular, reliable staff.

If you’re looking for agency work where you can come and go, this will not be the right fit for you. We’re looking for consistency and our clients are looking for consistency. So please only apply with us if you can give us regular and consistent availabilities for shifts and you’re really keen on building relationships with us and with our clients. Reliability is also a must.

For Medical Professionals and Healthcare Executives

If you’re an intensive care specialist or an ED specialist, we also want to hear from you. We’re currently expanding our medical team as well.

We can also help you eliminate your bed blocks in your ICU and in your ED for your long-term patients or for your regularly readmitting patients with our critical care nursing team at home. We’re here to help to take the pressure off your ICU and ED beds. In most cases, you won’t even pay for it. Even if you do pay for it, it is so much more cost-effective than what you’re paying for in ICU and ED settings, and you get the same level of care and simply more patient and family satisfaction because you also want to partner with your consumers.

If you are a hospital executive watching this, we can help you free up your ICU and ED beds.

International Support

If you’re in the U.S. or in the UK and you’re watching this and you need help, we want to hear from you as well. We can help you there privately with one-on-one consulting and with hiring nurses privately.

Once again, our website is intensivecareathome.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website or simply send us an email to [email protected].

If you like my videos, click the like button, subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families with Intensive Care at Home and intensive care. Click the like button, click the notification bell, and share this video with anyone who has a family member in intensive care long-term or needs to see this.

Thank you so much for watching.

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

Take care for now.