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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,

INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME IS HIRING ICU/PICU NURSES IN MELBOURNE, MORNINGTON PENINSULA, WARRAGUL, DROUIN, SUNBURY, SYDNEY, WOLLONGONG, AND WAGGA WAGGA.

 

You can check out last week’s blog by clicking on the link below this video:

https://intensivecareathome.com/intensive-care-at-home-is-hiring-icu-picu-nurses-in-melbourne-mornington-peninsula-warragul-drouin-sunbury-sydney-wollongong-and-wagga-wagga/

In today’s blog post, I want to answer a question from one of our clients and the question today is

My 38-year old Sister is in ICU with Ovarian Cancer on TPN. Can She Go Home? 

So Lorena writes, 

Hi Patrik,

My 38-year old sister has been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. She has been in and out of ICU after surgery, and thankfully, while she’s not ventilated, she does require a 24 hours TPN and she has a central line.

Now, the hospital is very reluctant to discharge her home saying that TPN can’t be managed at home without 24-hour nursing care. What are our options to leave the hospital? We are so tired going to hospital every day to support our sister. We desperately want to go home. Can you please let us know what our options are?

From Lorena.

Hi Lorena.

Thank you so much for making contact and sharing your sister’s situation with us. Lorena, your sister can go home with TPN. There’s absolutely no reason why she can’t go home as long as she’s hemodynamically stable.

You haven’t mentioned anything about ventilation. You haven’t mentioned anything about inotropes or vasopressors. So on that end, your sister can go home because with a service like Intensive Care at Home, we can manage central lines at home, PICC lines at home. We can manage the infusion, obviously with the pump, with the TPN, especially with TPN, there can be a lot of air alarms in particular because it’s so sensitive with the solution that’s running through the pump.

So, you know, there’s often a lot of troubleshooting going on just by having the infusion running. And you certainly don’t want air going into your sister’s body and if that’s not being troubleshooted properly and not being troubleshooted 24 hours a day, it could cause great damage. Furthermore, just hooking on and hooking off TPN really requires the skill of a critical care nurse.

And also, just a dressing change for a central line or for a PICC line, again requires the skill of a critical care nurse. Flushing the lumens on the central line and on the PICC line, again requires the skill of a critical care nurse who is used to dealing with central lines or PICC lines all the time.

So the options really are to, you know, talk to us more and look at the options of taking your sister home if she needs 24-hour TPN and therefore also 24-hour nursing care with intensive care nurses who can manage the TPN and the PICC line/central line.

You should also be looking at NDIS funding or potentially a hospital in the home funding and take the first step there but we can help you with accessing, especially NDIS funding. We are quite experienced in advocating for our clients and with our clients to get the funding necessary to leave hospital and have a better quality of life at home, or in some instances have a better quality of life at home.

If you have any other questions, please let me know. Take care.

From Patrik.

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.