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If you want to know if Intensive Care at Home can look after patients at home on BIPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure) and high flow nasal cannula, stay tuned! I’ve got news for you.

My name is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecareathome.com where we provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomies at home and where we also provide tailor-made solutions for hospitals and intensive care units whilst providing quality care for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomy at home, otherwise medically complex adults and children at home, which includes Home BIPAP, Home CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure), also home tracheostomy care for adults and children that are not ventilated, Home TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition), home IV potassium infusions, home IV magnesium infusions, and 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, which includes also palliative care at home.

So, in today’s question that I have from a client that I spoke to yesterday is, “Can Intensive Care at Home look after high flow nasal cannula or high flow nasal prongs at home with alternating BIPAP?” Well, the short answer to this is, yes, because we’ve done this before.

So, the situation is this, this gentleman’s mother is in ICU at the moment, and she’s got a pneumonia and she’s going from BIPAP to high flow nasal cannula whenever she can have a break from the BIPAP, she’s going on to high flow nasal cannula. She’s up to 60% of FiO2 (fraction of inspired oxygen) at the moment. She’s got a pneumonitis as well. She’s got a history of pulmonary fibrosis. She also has a nasal jejunostomy tube for post pyloric feeds, which is actually a safer option for the BIPAP in particular because there’s less aspiration risk compared to nasogastric tube feeds or PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy) tube feeds. She also has a history of small nodular lung cancer for the last seven years and she just wants to get out of ICU as quickly as possible. She also has a PICC line where she’s currently getting I V antibiotics and obviously, the client asks us, can we take his mother home as quickly as possible?

She is otherwise hemodynamically stable. She’s not on any inotropes or vasopressor right now. He just says his mother is not comfortable in the hospital, she’s not comfortable in ICU, and he’s asking us, can we take her home as quickly as possible? And I said, “Yes, of course, we can.” She probably needs a hoist at home or a lifting machine like a Hoyer machine. She needs a hospital bed. She also needs an oxygen concentrator or some oxygen cylinder so that oxygen can be delivered. We can organize the equipment, whether it’s a BIPAP machine and the high flow machine.

Again, something we’ve done before on a number of occasions and certainly something we can do for this client as well. With the nasal jejunostomy tube, obviously that needs to be secured, but this lady needs some nutrition, of course, like any other patient as well. But we’ve also looked at home after nasogastric tubes, nasal jejunostomy tube, PEG tube, PEJ (Percutaneous endoscopic jejunostomy) tube, so this is all bread and butter for us because we are sending critical care nurses into the home that can manage all of these situations.

So, I hope that answers your questions in terms of our capabilities with Intensive Care at Home.

Now, with Intensive Care at Home, we are currently operating all around Australia in all major capital cities as well as in regional and rural areas. We are a NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) accredited service provider. We are a TAC (Transport Accident Commission) approved service provider in Victoria as well as WorkSafe in Victoria, iCare in New South Wales, NIISQ (National Injury Insurance Scheme) in Queensland. We are also a DVA (Department of Veteran Affairs) approved service provider all around Australia. We have received funding through public hospitals, private health funds as well as departments of health.

We are also providing Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS Support Coordination which would be critical in a situation like that to get on the NDIS funding scheme.

If you are at home already, maybe in a similar situation and you don’t have enough support, you don’t have enough help, your family member or yourself is going back to hospital all the time, please know that there’s help at hand.

With Intensive Care at Home, our mission is to keep our clients at home predictably, so they don’t go back to hospital all the time. So, if you’re at home already, please reach out to us and you can reach out to us at intensivecareathome.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website or send an email to [email protected].

Now, also what is important to know if you are a NDIS support coordinator and you’re looking for nursing care for your participants, please reach out to us as well. If you’re looking for more funding for nursing care, I also encourage you to reach out to us. We can help with the advocacy. We also provide NDIS nursing assessments.

Furthermore, if you are a 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 on the New South Wales Victorian border, Bendigo, Victoria, as well as Warragul, Victoria. If you have worked in critical care for a minimum of two years i.e. ICU, pediatric ICU, ED, and you have ideally completed a postgraduate critical care qualification, we want to hear from you.

We are offering a tailor-made solution to our clients, which includes regular staff. Our clients want to have the same staff coming over and over again because they are so vulnerable and it’s all about relationship building for us. So, if you are looking for agency work where you can come and go, this may not be the right fit for you. But if you are interested in a longer long-term engagement with us and building relationships with our clients that are win-win situations, then we absolutely want to hear from you.

If you are an intensive care specialist, we also want to hear from you. We are currently expanding our medical team.

If you are an intensive care specialist or an ICU consultant currently working in ICU, we also can help you eliminate your bed blocks in ICU especially for your long-term ICU patients, and we can help you there and you won’t even pay for it, with all the funding schemes that are paying for community care.

If you’re a hospital executive and you have bed blocks in your hospital, in ICU, in ED, respiratory wards, we can help you. Please reach out to us as well.

We have also sent our critical care nurses into the home for emergency department bypass services as part of the Western Sydney Local Area Health District in-touch service and we’ve avoided many emergency department admissions as well and we can do the same for your ED or for your hospital.

If you are in the U.S. or in the U.K., you’re watching this, we want to hear from you as well. We can help you there privately.

Once again, all of that you get at intensivecareathome.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website or send us an email to [email protected].

If you like my videos, 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, share this video with your friends and families, and comment below what you want to see next, what questions and insights you have.

I also do a weekly YouTube live where I answer your questions live on the show and you will get notification for the YouTube live if you are a subscriber to my YouTube channel or if you are a subscriber to our intensivecareathome.com email newsletter at intensivecareathome.com.

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 for now.