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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 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,
You can check out last week’s blog by clicking on the link below this video:
In today’s blog of the intensive care at home series. I want to answer a question from Paula.
My 18-month Old Daughter Has a Very Complex Medical History. She Has a Tracheostomy and Stuck in the Pediatric ICU. What Can We Do To Get My Daughter Home?
Now, Paula has the following situation. She says,
Hi Patrik,
My 18-month old daughter has a very complex medical history given her short life. She was born prematurely. She had the cardiac arrest. She then ended up with hypoventilation syndrome and she also was diagnosed with brain cancer about six months ago. She has been through chemotherapy in all of her 18 months. She has a tracheostomy and we’re stuck in the pediatric ICU and we are in Melbourne Australia.
What can we do to get my daughter home? Me and my husband have been living in ICU for the last 18 months and we haven’t really been able to get home, look after our four-year old son and our family life is just horrible. What can we do as the next steps? I’m hearing that intensive care at home can take ventilated adults and children home and how can we go about it?
From Paula.
Hi Paula,
Well, thank you so much Paula for contacting us. So, let’s look at the positives straight away. Yes, we at intensive care at home, can get you and your daughter home so you can live a normal family life. How does that happen? Well, especially for our viewers in Australia, there is now the NDIS, the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the National Disability Insurance Scheme is funding home care nursing for up to 24 hours a day and that’s how most of our clients are funded now.
They’re getting funding for nurses 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days of the year, as long as it’s medically necessary. And for someone that is on a ventilator with a tracheostomy, it’s medically absolutely necessary, it’s according to best practice, to evidence-based practice, which you can look up on our website, intensivecareathome.com where we publish the home mechanical ventilation guidelines that clearly demand that any ventilated patient, either inside or outside of intensive care, needs to have an intensive care nurse with them 24 hours a day and that is the gold standard.
The reality is that adults and children have died at home with tracheostomies or ventilation if they’re not looked after 24 hours a day by intensive care nurses, and that’s just a tragedy and it needs to be avoided full stop whilst also looking at the quality of life for clients at home so that they can leave intensive care as quickly as possible, which also by the way, provides a win-win situation because we’re helping intensive care units to free up their beds and make room for other critically ill adults and children that are in need of intensive care beds, so win-win situation all around.
And for you as a family, of course, you want to go home. We know from any families that have a situation like you are describing, it can’t work. They can’t look after other family members, their whole lives are literally falling apart and again, we can help to reinstate normality by getting clients home with basically bringing the intensive care into your home rather than you going into intensive care and again, funded by the NDIS.
So, what you should be doing as a next step, please contact us. Give me a call here in Australia, my number is 0410942230 and then we can take the next steps. For example, we need to get the advocacy rolling with the NDIS. We are very experienced in how to roll out the advocacy and how to get funding for you and for our other clients otherwise we wouldn’t be in business.
Because we have the expertise, we have the clinical knowledge. We also have the network that can help you to achieve your goals and get home and get out of ICU. We also provide our own support coordination here at intensivecareathome.
We are certainly finding that most NDIS support coordinators are not clinical people and especially when it comes to ventilation with tracheostomy, you do want a team around you that understands the intensive care that understands ventilation and tracheostomy inside out. Here at intensive care at home, we are employing hundreds of years of intensive care nursing experience. You couldn’t be in better hands because we’re having a wealth of knowledge employed with within our business and we are dealing with the NDIS and the funding side of things on a day by day basis.
So reach out to us and we can help you get your child and your family home as quickly as possible with 24-hour intensive home care nursing to make it safe for your ventilated daughter to be at home in the comfort with your family.
So that is my answer to today’s question.
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
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.