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If you want to know what happens when a patient at home on BIPAP support is not getting 24-hour nursing care with critical care nurses, stay tuned. I’ve got news for you.
So, one of our clients recently that was NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) funded for 24-hour nursing care because the client needs BIPAP intermittently for a very rare neurological disability had the funding pulled out of her rug overnight from the NDIS with no explanation. Lo and behold, the client or the NDIS participant went back to hospital in no time. Well, that was the whole exercise of having 24 hour funded nursing care to keep the client and NDIS participant out of hospital.
It’s getting worse what happened because the client was so stressed, the client ended up in atrial fibrillation and ended up with a prolonged hospital admission because of the atrial fibrillation.
Now, while we were looking after the client at home, we always kept a very close eye on the client’s potassium levels and magnesium levels to avoid the client going into AF (atrial fibrillation) in the first place. Now, that’s what the specialized Intensive Care at Home service is actually doing, and that’s the expertise that we are bringing into the community to avoid hospital and ICU readmissions.
Now, that is until NDIS bureaucrats and most of the time, non-clinical decision makers, people with no clinical background whatsoever, make arbitrary decisions and put lives at risk and costing the taxpayer more money than keeping someone at home because a hospital bed, ICU bed in particular, it’s much more expensive than home care.
The NDIS, Bill shorten in particular, lately has said, “Oh, they’ve shaved over billion dollars off the total bill for NDIS.” Well, that comes at a cost by cutting funding for very vulnerable NDIS participants and then going to hospital is just shifting money around.
Bill Shorten might be saving money for the NDIS scheme but if people are going to hospital, someone else is paying. It’s coming out of another taxpayer’s bracket, i.e., state government tax money, and it’s more expensive. Let alone the pain, the desperation that clients and their families go through when they get readmitted to hospital because the NDIS is pulling the rug out of their funding.
Well, thankfully, the NDIS has at least reinstated some of the funding, if not most of the funding for this particular client and we are back working there.
But once again, it needs to be highlighted here and truth need to be told that when Bill Shorten says he’s cut out a billion dollars out of the NDIS, well, that gets patients and NDIS participants back to hospital and they should be at home predictably, which is what we do. We keep our clients home predictably, as long as the funding is there, saving half of the cost of an intensive care bed, and keeping the intensive care bed empty, making sure that people who need critical care can actually have it.
Once again, it is all about creating win-win situations with Intensive Care at Home as long as reasonable people with common sense make the right decisions, but it looks like with some NDIS bureaucrats, common sense is not all that common.
So, I trust that you don’t believe all the propaganda that comes from Bill Shorten and his office saying, “Well, we’ve saved a billion dollars for the taxpayer.” Well, maybe for NDIS taxpayers, but it’s coming out of another pocket of money costing a lot more. Once again, not even mentioning the pain, the frustration, the desperation that NDIS participants go through if they go to hospital because the funding rug is pulled out of them and that is just not right. It’s negligent and it needs to be called out.
The NDIS is screaming incompetency in some cases, especially when it comes to clinical decisions. When a disability leads to nursing care or the need for nursing care, then the NDIS needs to fund. It’s an insurance scheme and it needs to follow through and not advertise publicly that they’ve shaved a billion dollars off the scheme by exposing fraud.
Don’t get me wrong, if there’s people on the NDIS providers committing fraud, they need to be exposed. By the same token, the NDIS also needs to be exposed if clients who are extremely vulnerable are not getting the right level of funding, that also needs to be exposed, which is the case here.
So, that also leads me to whether we can actually manage AF (Atrial Fibrillation) at home with BIPAP. Yes, we can because we have done that with this particular client, and we’ve been putting monitors into place. We’ve been monitoring medications for AF such as Amiodarone, digoxin, monitoring potassium levels, that is all part of our skill set with Intensive Care at Home, just in case you’re wondering whether that is part of our skill set.
So, with Intensive Care at Home, we provide a tailor-made solution for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomies at home. We also provide tailor-made solutions for hospitals and intensive care units at home whilst we’re providing quality care for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomies at home. Otherwise, medically complex adults and children at home, which includes Home BIPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure), Home CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure), home tracheostomy care for adults and children that are not ventilated, Home TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition), home IV potassium, home IV magnesium infusions, home IV antibiotics. We also provide port management, central line management, PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) line management, as well as Hickman’s line management and we also provide palliative care services at home.
We are also sending our critical care nurses into the home for emergency department bypass services, and we have done so as part of the Western Sydney Local Area Health District, they’re in-touch program, saving approximately $2,000 per patient that we kept at home with our emergency department bypass service instead of going to ED. We’re also cutting the cost of the intensive care bed by approximately 50%.
With Intensive Care at Home, we’re currently operating all around Australia and all major capital cities as well as in regional and rural areas. We are an NDIS as approved service provider all around the country, TAC (Transport Accident Commission) and WorkSafe approved in Victoria, iCare in New South Wales, NIISQ (National Injury Insurance Scheme in Queensland), DVA (Department of Veteran Affairs) all around the country. Our clients have also received funding through public hospitals, private health funds, as well as departments of health.
We are the only service provider in Australia in 2024 that has achieved third-party accreditation for Intensive Care at Home nursing. No other provider has created that much intellectual property for Intensive Care at Home nursing than we have. We are therefore in a position to employ hundreds of years of intensive care and critical care nursing experience in the community combined. No other provider brings this level of expertise into the community than we do.
If you’re at home already and you’re watching this and you’re on a ventilator, tracheostomy, BIPAP, CPAP, Home TPN, palliative care, whatever the case may be, you realize that your current setup is not working, and it is most likely dangerous that your current setup is not working, you’re not having the skills, expertise, and mindset or the funding you need to keep you at home predictably, and you feel unsafe when you’re going back to ICU or to hospitals all the time, then please reach out to us at intensivecareathome.com before something serious happens.
If you’re stuck in an ICU on a ventilator with a tracheostomy, or if your family member is stuck in a situation in ICU on a ventilator with a tracheostomy or with other conditions long-term, please reach out to us as well. Many patients in the community have died on ventilation with tracheostomy because of not having critical care nurses because of having a support worker model.
We are not getting tired of mentioning that someone on a ventilator with a tracheostomy needs to be looked after by critical care nurses, 24 hours a day, not by support workers, not by enrolled nurses, not even by general registered nurses without intensive care nursing experience that is evidence-based. You can find the evidence on our section at the Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines on our website.
We have proven our concept Intensive Care at Home way back when support workers could not keep a ventilated and tracheostomy client at home predictably, putting the life of the client in danger, that’s how we proved our concept. This client never ever went back to ICU again when we started with 24 hour providing care with critical care nurses, 24 hours a day. So, our model is evidence-based.
This is also one of the reasons why we are heavily involved in the advocacy for our clients, that’s why we’re providing Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS Support Coordination. Our NDIS Support Coordinator, Amanda Riches in Victoria has a wealth of knowledge, and I’ll put a link in the written version of this blog to an interview with Amanda.
If you are an NDIS Support Coordinator 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 from a nursing care for your participants and you don’t know how to go about it and what evidence to provide, I also encourage you to reach out to us. We can help you with the right advocacy. We also provide NDIS specialist nursing assessments done by critical care nurses with a legal nurse consulting background.
If you are critical care nurse and you’re looking for a career change, we are currently offering jobs for critical care nurses in the home in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane in Albury, Wodonga, in Bendigo in Victoria, as well as in Warragul and Geelong in Victoria. If you have worked in critical care for a minimum of two years pediatric ICU, ED, and you have already completed a postgraduate critical care nursing qualification, we will be delighted to hear from you.
These only apply if you’re looking for regular shifts. We are not an agency where people come and go, please only apply if you want to work with our clients on a regular basis.
If you are an intensive care specialist or an ED specialist, we also want to hear from you. We’re currently expanding our medical team. 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 you take the pressure off your ICU and ED beds and in most cases, you won’t even pay for it.
If you’re a hospital executive watching this and you have bed blocks in your ICU, ED, respiratory ward, et cetera, please reach out to us as well. We can help you.
If you’re in the U.S. or in the U.K. watching this and you need help, we want to hear from you as well. We can help you there privately.
Once again, our website is intensivecareathome.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website or send us an email to [email protected].
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Thank you so much for watching.
This is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecareathome.com and I will talk to you in a few days.
Take care.