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If you want to know what conditions we can look after at home with Intensive Care at Home, stay tuned! I’ve got news for you today.
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 at home whilst 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 infusions, home IV magnesium infusions as well as 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’re also sending our critical care nurses into the home for emergency department bypass services. We have done so successfully for the Western Sydney Local Area Health District, their in-touch program saving $2,000 per ED bypass service that we have provided at home.
Now, we get a lot of inquiries on what conditions we can look after at home. Today, I want to give another example reading out from a client’s medical history. Of course, I’m not giving away any details of the patient, just reading out the client’s condition.
So, the patient is with chronic respiratory failure, with tracheostomy and ventilation dependency, PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy) tube in place for nutrition and medication administration, sacral wound with wound-vacuum assisted closure being followed by wound care, pulmonology, and respiratory. Patient is minimally interactive, does have an anoxic brain injury, status post wound to the head, cervical spine, and does retract from painful tactile stimuli.
The family is at the bedside but wants to go home, which is what we are doing for them. No anxiety or depression noted or reported, having normal bowel movements, Foley catheter in place with clear yellow urine noted, for monitoring closely. No indication of pain, fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath or wheezing.
Other issues that the patient and client experienced were hypercapnia, acute and chronic respiratory failure with hypoxia, pneumonia, bradycardia, dysphagia (oropharyngeal phase), anoxic brain damage, pressure ulcer of the sacral region, encephalopathy, unspecified convulsions, quadriplegia, neuromuscular dysfunction of bladder, critical illness myopathy, inflammatory conditions of jaws, unspecified intracranial injury with loss of consciousness (status unknown, subsequent encounter), puncture wound without foreign body of pharynx and cervical esophagus (subsequent encounter), and then obviously have the tracheostomy, is now ventilated and ready to go home for discharge.
Besides the equipment that we will organize, which is two ventilators, two suction machines, two monitors, spare tracheostomy tubes and so forth, other things that need to be looked at are the right team, of course. You need the right team for your loved one at home for 24-hour nursing care with Intensive Care at Home. It’s all about really hand selecting the staff that have the skills, experience, qualifications but also mindset that you simply need to bring to the table to work with Intensive Care at Home clients and their families. Other things that need to be put in place is the funding, who’s paying for it. But the bottom line is, a funding body has an interest because the intensive care bed costs around $5,000 to $6,000 per bed day and therefore, Intensive Care at Home is approximately 50% of that cost. So, that’s a win-win situation.
Other things that need to be organized are hospital bed, Hoyer lift or hoist, whether that’s a ceiling hoist or a portable hoist, wheelchair, but the bottom line is, the family is spending day and night in ICU, and we are bringing the intensive care to the home, which means such better opportunity and such a better quality of life at home for patients and for families. The hospital needs the ICU bed anyway, and it makes perfect sense to go home.
So, I hope that helps you even more understand how we can help, what patients we can help at home, how we can cut the cost of an ICU bed by 50%, and how we can free up ICU beds with what’s needed.
With Intensive Care at Home, we are currently operating all around Australia in all major capital cities as well as in all regional and rural areas. We are a NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) approved service provider all around Australia. We are TAC (Transport Accident Commission) approved and WorkSafe approved in Victoria, iCare in New South Wales, and NIISQ (National Injury Insurance Scheme) in Queensland, and DVA (Department of Veteran Affairs) all around the country. Our clients and we as a 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 in 2024 that has achieved third-party accreditation for Intensive Care at Home nursing. We have achieved that accreditation since 2012. No other provider has created this 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 nursing experience in the community combined.
If you’re at home already and you realize that you’re on a ventilator, tracheostomy, BIPAP, CPAP, home TPN, whatever the case may be, and you realize that your current setup is not working and is even dangerous, that your current team, if you have one, is not having the skills, expertise or mindset to keep you at home predictably and safely, if you are feeling unsafe, you’re going back to ICU all the time, you’re going back to hospitals all the time, then you should reach out to us here at intensivecareathome.com. We have turned around many of our clients lives by keeping them out of hospital and out of ICU predictably, and also whilst doing the advocacy for them with the funding that is required for Intensive Care at Home. We can help you with getting the right funding.
That’s also why we’re providing Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS Support Coordination, as well as TAC case management in Victoria. Our NDIS support coordinator and TAC case manager, Amanda Riches have a wealth of knowledge in their team. I’ll put a link in the written version of this blog to an interview that I’ve done with Amanda a while ago.
If you’re a 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 for more 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 advocacy and with the evidence. We provide NDIS specialist nursing assessments as well, done by critical care nurses with the legal nurse consulting background.
If you’re a critical care nurse and you are watching this and you’re looking for a career change, we’re 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 in Victoria and in 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.
I have a disclaimer! Because we are offering a tailor-made solution for our clients, which includes regular staff. Our clients will have the same staff coming over and over again because they’re so vulnerable and so special. It’s all about building those critical relationships with our clients and with our team members and having regular and stable teams. That means if you are looking for agency work, where you can come and go, this is probably not the right fit for you on a long-term basis, because our clients want regular and the same staff over and over again. So, it’s all about building those critical relationships with our clients, and we want to build relationships with you as well, of course, so that it remains a win-win situation.
If you’re an intensive care specialist or an ED specialist, we also want to hear from you. We are currently expanding our medical team.
We can help you eliminate your bed blocks in ICU and ED for your long-term patients or for your regular 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 wards etc., please reach out to us as well. We can help you.
If you are in the U.S. or in the U.K. and you’re watching this and you need help, we want to hear from you there 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 info@intensivecareathome.com.
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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 for now.