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My name is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecareathome.com, where we provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomy, where we also provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated adults and children at home on BiPAP CPAP, known as non-invasive ventilation. Home cough assist management, home ventilation weaning, home TPN, home IV fluids, home IV potassium, home IV antibiotics, home IV magnesium infusions, central line, PICC line, Hickman’s line, port management at home. Nasogastric tube, nasojejunostomy tube, PEG tube, SPC, IDC management at home, as well as palliative care management at home.

“Here is what families and support coordinators need to advocate for:

• Funding under the correct NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) line items for specialist nursing — not High Intensity Support Workers
• 1:1 CCRN (Critical Care Registered Nurse) ratios for the majority of the day and all overnight hours
• 2:1 ratios during transfers, personal cares, and community access — reflecting the genuine two-person clinical requirement
• Separate funding for deep suctioning as a nursing-only intervention
• Recognition that BiPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure) management, oxygen titration, and seizure medication decisions are within the nursing scope — not support worker scope

IMPORTANT: Funding support workers for a participant who requires a CCRN is not a cost-saving measure. It is a clinical safety failure. If something goes wrong, the consequences for the participant — and potentially for the NDIS planner and provider — are severe.

If you need help building the clinical case for NDIS funding, or if you are heading into a plan review and need to document why your child requires CCRN-level care, I can help you through my consulting service.

How Intensive Care at Home Can Support a Child Like Sophie
At Intensive Care at Home, we have been doing exactly this since 2012. We operate across Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia, and we are staffed exclusively by Critical Care Registered Nurses, not support workers.

We are the only home nursing provider in Australia that is third-party accredited specifically for intensive care at home nursing. We hold ISO 9001:2015 certification and NDIS Quality and Safety Commission accreditation, audited by BSI Group. Our accreditation details are here:

intensivecareathome.com/accreditationquality

For children with complex respiratory needs like Sophie’s, our clinical team includes nurses with direct experience in:

• BiPAP and NIV management in the home environment
• Deep nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal suctioning
• Refractory epilepsy management and rescue medication administration
• Enteral feeding and gastrostomy care
• Pressure injury prevention for GMFCS V (Gross Motor Function Classification System) clients
• Infection control for multi-resistant organisms, including CPE (Carbapenemase-Producing Enterobacterales)
• Overnight monitoring and SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy) risk reduction

We work with families, NDIS coordinators, hospital discharge teams, and treating clinicians to build safe, sustainable home care plans that genuinely reflect what the participant needs — not what is cheapest or most convenient.

Need Help Navigating NDIS Funding for Your Medically Complex Child?
If you’re the family or carer of a child with complex medical needs who requires critical care nursing at home — not just support workers — I can help you.

At Intensive Care at Home, we are Australia’s only third-party accredited specialist home nursing provider for ventilator-dependent and medically complex adults and children. We are accredited to ISO 9001:2015 and certified by the NDIS Quality and Safety Commission. You can review our full accreditation here:
intensivecareathome.com/accreditationquality
And if your child requires home ventilation support, our evidence-based clinical guidelines are available here:
intensivecareathome.com/mechanical-home-ventilation-guidelines

The Bottom Line
Sophie’s case is not an outlier. Across Australia, there are hundreds — possibly thousands — of children and adults with this level of medical complexity who are either stuck in hospital, unsafe at home without appropriate nursing, or being cared for by support workers who are simply not trained or equipped for the job.

The answer is not to lower the bar on clinical safety. The answer is to fund Critical Care Registered Nurses — appropriately, at the right ratios, 24 hours a day — so that children like Sophie can live at home with their families, in dignity, and with the clinical safety they deserve.

That is what Intensive Care at Home exists to provide. And that is what your child deserves.”

 

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 Hotline. 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.