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Hi it’s Patrik Hutzel from INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME where we provide tailor made solutions for long-term ventilated Adults & Children with Tracheostomies by improving their Quality of life and where we also provide tailor made solutions to hospitals and Intensive Care Units to save money and resources, whilst providing Quality Care
So in today’s video, I want to talk about
How can you as a family obtain funding for intensive care at home?
Because we are getting this question from families all the time, families mainly have a loved one in intensive care, or families who have a loved one at home and have a loved one on life support. Meaning ventilation, tracheostomy, or bipap ventilation or sometimes, clients may not even be on a ventilator, but they may be having medical complexities such as complex seizure management, and especially with complex seizure management, patients might have an unstable airway and an unstable airway needs the skills of an intensive care nurse. Hence, intensive care at home is the right service for that.
At the time of the recording of this video,we’re in early 2020 now and as of 2020, there are several ways of obtaining funding for intensive care at home 24 hour nursing care with intensive care nurses or pediatric intensive care nurses. So as some of you may know, the NDIS or the National Disability Insurance Scheme has kicked in for a few years now in Australia.
And the National Disability Insurance Scheme has started to fund nursing care. Right. And with that, the NDIS is funding nursing care, you need to obtain medical and nursing evidence that your loved one qualifies for that.
But I can assure you that if your loved one is on ventilation and tracheostomy, most likely they will qualify for 24 hour nursing care as most of our clients have obtained that funding already.
Now, this is often not an overnight sort of event. But we have advocated or helped to advocate for so many clients now, and we’ve done a lot of legwork for our clients successfully.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in business and we wouldn’t be helping clients to stay at home instead of intensive care on a day by day basis. So therefore the NDIS is is one funding avenue.
But sometimes we get funding through public hospitals as well. And in other instances, we get funding through private health insurances, or in some instances, we get funding through a hospital in the home model or through a palliative care in the home model.
So the bottom line is this.
Whether you have a loved one in intensive care, or whether you have a loved one at home on a ventilator, but you don’t have the support your loved one needs (yet), if they are on life support and ventilation because ventilation and tracheostomy skills take years of training, specialized training in intensive care.
So you can’t just take lay people off the street and look after somebody on a ventilator with a tracheostomy that’s simply dangerous. You know, if your loved one goes back to intensive care, they wouldn’t be having somebody off the street looking after your loved one, they would have fully qualified Intensive Care Nurses looking after your loved one and we offer at the end of the day, we’re offering an intensive care substitution service that’s highly valuable. Because where would you rather be at home or in intensive care? I think the answer is rather obvious, especially if you get the same care and treatment at home.
The other issue is, when patients are either in intensive care long term on a ventilator, having a tracheostomy or even if they’re only on non invasive ventilation like BIPAP or CPAP, the cost is enormous. So the cost of an intensive care bed is around $5,000 to $6,000 per bed day.
On top of that, ICU beds and pediatric ICU beds are in high demand. So that means if a long term patient occupies an intensive care bed and therefore blocking other patients that need an intensive care bed and often surgery gets canceled because of the unavailability of an ICU/PICU bed. Or emergency departments get bypassed because there are no intensive care beds.
Therefore there is a much bigger picture at play here.
Therefore our service is not only valuable for you as a family or for a client, but also for hospital ICU’s and for the health system in general. So with that cost with that high cost of $5,000 to $6,000 per day in intensive care. That’s why a HITH model or hospital in the home model is so attractive, because under a hospital in the home model, we can cut the cost of an intensive care bed by about 50%. And we can free up the intensive care bed and you as a family can be at home. So it’s a win win situation all together. So it doesn’t really matter where the funding is coming from whether it’s through a hospital in the home model, whether it’s through the NDIS, whether it’s through the Department of Health, I should have mentioned that earlier.
We’re also getting funding through the Department of Health, because again, we are providing a win win situation and the Department of Health, for example, would fund an intensive care but that costs them $5,000 to $6,000 per bed day, and instead, they’re paying us about half of that cost, and they’re saving half of the cost of an intensive care bed and they have more resources available in intensive care.
So, again, what we are very experienced with is we have pretty much done a lot of the advocacy for all of our clients successfully because again, otherwise we wouldn’t be in business.
I started the service from scratch and nobody was giving us money in the beginning. So we had to successfully advocate we had no other choice, we had to make this work for our clients.
Otherwise, again, we wouldn’t be in business and we wouldn’t be successfully keeping intensive care patients at home with intensive care nurses 24 hours a day, and we can do the same for you.
Because we are so highly specialized, we understand intensive care inside out. And we also understand the home care sector of intensive care inside out and we know how the two overlap and we know how we can get you the funding that you will need to improve your and your loved ones quality of life. So really, it’s a case of you’re contacting us and we can help you take the next steps to get your loved one out of intensive care or again, if you have your loved one at home already and they’re going to ICU/PICU regularly and you’re struggling with support, because you don’t have intensive care nurses, please contact me and I will take you through the next steps so that you can use intensive care at home as well.
Thank you for watching this video. So if you want to again, find out how we can help you please contact us on one of the phone numbers on the top of the website or send me an email to [email protected] or call me on 041 094 2230
Also, if you are an intensive care nurse or a pediatric intensive care nurse, please check out our career section we have multiple vacancies for ICU and pediatric ICU nurses in the Melbourne metropolitan area, including the Warragul area, Sunbury, the mornington Peninsula, so You’re very welcome to contact us if you’re an intensive care nurse.
https://intensivecareathome.com/careers/
Please also check out our services section where our services are broken down into segments when it comes to client care.
https://intensivecareathome.com/services/
Also, we have been part of the Royal Melbourne health accelerator program in the past for innovative healthcare companies.
Thank you so much for tuning into this week’s blog. This is Patrik Hutzel, from intensive care at home, and I’ll talk to you next week. Take care.