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If you want to know if your daughter on a ventilator with a tracheostomy and cancer can go home on a ventilator with Intensive Care at Home, stay tuned! I will answer that question 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 whilst providing quality care for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomies at home and also otherwise medically complex adults and children at home including Home BIPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure), Home CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure), home tracheostomy care when adults and children are not ventilated, also Home TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition). We also provide IV potassium, IV magnesium infusions at home, as well as IV antibiotic infusions at home. We also provide port management, central line management, PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) line management, Hickman’s line management as well as palliative care services at home, which includes ventilation weaning at home as well.
So yesterday, I was actually talking to a lady who has her 30-year-old daughter in ICU with a midline glioma and a lesion in her cervical spine. The inflammation from the lesion is causing her needing to be ventilated. The diaphragm is partly paralyzed which makes it very difficult for her to trigger any spontaneous breaths. She also had multiple aspiration pneumonia as part of her ICU stay. The tumor is now stable but apparently inoperable, and she’s had a tracheostomy and she’s had a PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy) tube. Her ventilator settings are that in SIMV (Synchronized intermittent mandatory ventilation) mode with a rate of 16 breaths per minute. Apparently, she’s not breathing on top of that. She’s on the PEEP of 10, she is on room air (21% of oxygen), and she’s also on a cough assist machine.
The mother is asking if we can take this young lady home, and I said, “Yes, of course, we can.” It just goes to show that we are well prepared for the complexities of long-term intensive care because clearly, if it wasn’t for our service, those patients would be stuck in ICU long-term. She’s also saying obviously that her daughter is not living a good life in ICU. She is depressed, she has no quality of life, and she can’t wait to go home and take her home as quickly as possible. That’s what we do in Intensive Care at Home.
Pretty much all of our clients with very, very few rare exceptions have community access even in situations like that. We take them out, we’re not confining them to an ICU bed, we are looking at what quality of life can we provide for our clients at home. In 99% of cases that also includes community access, they can live their lives, go out, assuming everything is set up correctly, with hospital beds, wheelchairs, hoists or lifting machines, suction machines, ventilator as monitors, everything needs to be there, of course, all the emergency equipment and more importantly, in order to make a transition safe to a home care environment, a team of 24-hour critical care nurses is needed similar to what your daughter is getting right now in hospital.
Obviously, the funding needs to be set up, but once again, an ICU bed costs $5000 to $6000 per bed day and Intensive Care at Home approximately costs 50% of that; that in and of itself is a win-win situation. But ICUs desperately need the ICU beds because there’s a high demand on ICU beds worldwide, so once again, that’s also a win-win situation. The quality of life for your daughter and for yourself will be improved dramatically by going home, once again, that is also a win-win situation. Everyone is winning with Intensive Care at Home, assuming they are the right patient and has the right needs for our service.
Also, the other thing that I did mention to this lady is that with the diaphragm partly paralyzed, there might be a chance of a diaphragm pacer; obviously need to check that with the relevant specialist, with the neurosurgeon. A diaphragm pacer is a possibility because with the diaphragm pacer, ventilated adults and children with tracheostomy can sometimes have time off the ventilator and the diaphragm pacer is doing the ventilation for them.
So just some thoughts here, I hope that’s very helpful for you and shows once again what we are able to do with Intensive Care at Home. We’re changing the paradigm and have been doing so since 2012. I’ve worked with Intensive Care at Home since 2001 where I was part of setting up Intensive Care at Home in Germany in the early days and then uploaded to Australia in 2012. We’ve been successfully operating with Intensive Care at Home in Australia since 2012.
So that brings me to, we are operating currently all around Australia in all major capital cities and in all regional and rural areas. We are a NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) approved service provider all around Australia. We are a TAC (Transport Accident Commission) approved service provider in Victoria as well as WorkSafe in Victoria. We are iCare approved in New South Wales as well as NIISQ (National Injury Insurance Scheme) approved in Queensland. We are also a DVA (Department of Veteran Affairs) approved service provider all around Australia. We have also received funding through public hospitals, departments of health, as well as through private health funds. So, reach out to us if you need help.
If you’re at home already and you’re going back to hospital or to ICU all the time because you don’t have the right level of support, please reach out to us. Or you don’t have the right level of funding, a lot of patients go home without the right level of funding, they don’t even know what’s possible for them, what’s accessible for them. We’ve been advocating successfully for our clients from Day 1, otherwise we wouldn’t be running this service.
We are also providing Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS Support Coordination, and if you need help with access to the NDIS or if you need help with an upgrade of your NDIS plan for nursing care, if you need an upgrade of your plan with a change of circumstances or potentially an AAT (Administrative Appeals Tribunal) review, please reach out to us. We have the expertise in-house.
We’re also providing NDIS specialist nursing assessments and if you are a NDIS support coordinator from another organization and you need nursing care for your NDIS participants or for any other funded client, we want to hear from you. If you need a NDIS specialist nursing assessment, please reach out to us. We can help you. We can also help you with the advocacy for nursing care. Once again, we have done that successfully many, many times.
We are also sending our critical care nurses into people’s homes to avoid emergency department admissions. We have done so successfully for the Western Sydney Local Area Health District for the in-touch program. So, if your hospital needs to avoid bed blocks in emergency department and ICU, please reach out to us as well.
If you are a critical care nurse looking for a career change, we want to hear from you as well. If you’ve worked in critical care ICU, pediatric ICU, ED for a minimum of two years and you have ideally completed a postgraduate critical care nursing qualification, we want to hear from you. We currently have jobs in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Albury, Wodonga on the New South Wales Victorian border, in Bendigo in Victoria, as well as in the Warragul area in Country Victoria.
We are looking for critical care nurses that want to work with us regularly, that want to work with our clients regularly because we have a tailor-made solution for our clients and that includes regular staff and regular team members, not people that want to come and go. We are not a nursing agency. We are a service provider with a tailor-made solution for our clients.
If you’re an intensive care specialist or an ICU consultant, we also want to hear from you as we are currently expanding our medical team, please reach out to us.
If you are an ICU consultant and you have bed blocks in your ICU, you can reach out to us as well. We can help you eliminate your bed blocks in ICU and you won’t even pay for it. More importantly, we can improve the quality of life or quality of end of life for your patients and families in ICU.
If you’re a hospital executive watching this, we also want to hear from you because once again, we can help you eliminate bed blocks in ICU, pediatric ICU, and ED, and also on respiratory wards, please reach out to us as well. Once again and your hospital won’t even pay for it, especially with NDIS and private health funds, etc.
Our website again is intensivecareathome.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website or send us an email to [email protected].
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Also, if you are in the U.S. or in the U.K. watching this and you need help with Intensive Care at Home, please reach out to us as well. We can help you there privately.
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.