Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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.
In last week’s blog, I talked about,
CEREBRAL PALSY AND INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME!
You can check out last week’s blog by clicking on the link below this video:
https://intensivecareathome.com/cerebral-palsy-and-intensive-care-at-home/
In today’s blog post, I want to answer a question from one of our clients and the question today is
Can Your Services at Intensive Care at Home Help Us to Bring Our 18-year old Daughter with Cerebral Palsy on a Ventilator from ICU to Home?
Hi Patrik,
Please give me some input as to whether or not I am providing realistic care and have the proper thinking process for my loving and dear 18-year old cerebral palsy daughter, Maria. For the last year in 2020, Maria had more and more chest infections at home. I was looking after her, but I realized something was wrong with her breathing.
She had low oxygen levels and she had more and more chest infections eventually, she got pneumonia by the end of last year and she ended up in ICU where she was fighting infection and pneumonia. And we were then advised earlier this year that she needed a tracheostomy and she was placed on a ventilator.
Presently, she’s still in ICU and although they did try and wean her off the ventilator, staff in ICU are very concerned that her cerebral palsy prevents her from being successful in being weaned off the ventilator. I was seeking to have her reevaluated by an outside doctor, but that hasn’t happened yet.
We are in Sydney, Australia, and my daughter who is alert and is now also starting slowly to eat food, even though she’s ventilated with a tracheostomy, is very scared because even though she likes the food, she doesn’t want to aspirate and the doctors stop her from doing that. Maria keeps asking to have the tracheostomy and ventilator removed, which I don’t think is realistic, and the doctors also don’t think it’s realistic either.
However, the ICU at the moment has no plan for her care except maintenance. My concern is that she has excessive mucus and sputum, and all they do is, appear to solve it with suctioning. Can something else be done for this problem? How can you help with Intensive Care at Home? And can you wean her at home? Please share any knowledge and information you can have because we definitely want to take Maria home. We can’t be in ICU for much longer, especially now with COVID.
Please help.
From Joe
Hi Joe,
Thank you so much for sending through your question, Joe. I hope I can help you and I can shed a lot of light on that. So first of all, your daughter needs to leave intensive care as quickly as possible, and that can be done with Intensive Care at Home. And the funding should come through the NDIS especially you are in Sydney, Australia. There is definitely funding now for intensive home care, for 24-hour nursing care to get patients out of intensive care, especially if they have a ventilator and a tracheostomy. So that is the first thing you need to know.
Number two, you don’t want your daughter in ICU, especially with COVID at the moment. It’s just simply too dangerous for her to catch COVID as well in there. Number three, I’m not too surprised of what I’m seeing, because we have a number of patients at home that we are looking after with cerebral palsy and whilst none of them has a tracheostomy, most of them are ventilated on BiPAP ventilation without a tracheostomy, or they have BiPAP and a cough assist machine as well.
And prior to them having BiPAP or a cough assist machine, they were often having a nasopharyngeal airway, and we were suctioning them through the nose. But in either case, whether it’s cough assist, whether it’s tracheostomy, whether it’s BiPAP ventilation, even deep suctioning with a nasopharyngeal tube all require the specialist skill of an intensive care nurse, and can’t be done even by a general nurse.
So you’re absolutely on the right track that if they can’t wean your daughter off the ventilator, that she needs to go home and we can help you with that with Intensive Care at Home. It’s as simple as that, and we are helping the ICU to empty their bed. We’re saving them money. It’s a win-win situation altogether. We just need to get the process started for intensive care at home funding and that will go through the NDIS.
You should definitely contact us because we can also provide you with NDIS intake, we can provide you with specialist NDIS support coordination so we can help you on all levels. We can advocate for you in intensive care because we have hundreds of years of intensive care nursing experience employed in our business and we know about the advocacy process. We know about taking somebody from intensive care to home. We know about creating the teams that are needed to get Maria home. So the sooner you can contact us, the better it is.
Please check out intensivecareathome.com. Call me on one of the numbers on the top of the website, or simply send me an email to [email protected]. It is [email protected]. Take care for now.
Now, if you have a loved one in intensive care and you want to go home with our service intensive care at home and if you want to find out how to get funding for our service and how it all works, please contact us on one of the numbers on the top of our website, or send me an email to [email protected]. That’s Patrik, just with a K at the end.
Please also have a look at our case studies because there we highlight more about what we can do for clients, how clients can live at home with ventilation and tracheostomies and you can look at our case studies as well at our service section.
Intensive care at home Case studies
And if you are at home already and you need support for your critically ill loved one at home, and you have insufficient support or insufficient funding, please contact us as well. We can help you with all of that.
And if you are an intensive care nurse or a pediatric intensive care nurse with a minimum of two years, ICU or pediatric ICU experience, and you ideally have a critical care certificate, please contact us as well. Check out our career section on our website. We are currently hiring ICU and pediatric ICU nurses for clients in the Melbourne metropolitan area, Northern suburbs, Mornington Peninsula, Frankston area, South Gippsland, as well as Wollongong in New South Wales.
www.intensivecareathome.com/careers
So we are also an NDIS, TAC (Victoria) and DVA (Department of Veteran affairs) approved community service provider in Australia. Also have a look at our range of full service provisions.
Also, we have been part of the Royal Melbourne health accelerator program in the past for innovative healthcare companies.
https://www.thermh.org.au/news/innovation-funding-announced-melbourne-health-accelerator
https://www.melbournehealthaccelerator.com/
Thank you for watching this video and thank you for tuning into this week’s blog.
This is Patrik from Intensive Care at Home, and I’ll see you again next week in another update.