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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 post, I want to answer a question from one of our clients and the question today is
My Mom is Now 165 days in ICU on the Tracheostomy & the Ventilator. Can You Help Us Bring Her Home ASAP?
Hi Patrik,
My mother is still in ICU on the tracheostomy and the ventilator. The ICU will not cooperate and discharge her home with services like Intensive Care at Home yet. And ultimately she would like to get managed at home and so do we, as her family.
The ICU is telling us she can’t come off the ventilator. She has been in ICU now for 165 days, and we feel like she’s not getting the care she needs. And so far there are no signs that she can come off the ventilator. She’s too weak after being in a prolonged induced coma.
She initially went into ICU with a pneumonia, had complications with the pulmonary embolus. She went into AF, she had pulmonary edema and just couldn’t be weaned off the ventilator. Every time they tried to get her out of the induced coma, she was fighting against the ventilator. She was neurologically not coherent, and therefore they ended up re-sedating her until she ended up with a trach. And that got her stuck in ICU.
Now she’s depressed. She is getting out of bed here and there. She is getting physical therapy here and there, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. And after 165 days in ICU, she just had enough. And we as a family had enough, we’re sick of going into ICU every day and visiting her there knowing that services like Intensive Care at Home are out there and we want her home as soon as possible.
I have made a complaint to the hospital, but so far they are not even discussing a discharge home yet. They’re saying, she can’t go home before she’s been weaned off the ventilator. My mother is only 56 and we are in Sydney, Australia, and we want to go home as quickly as possible. Will the NDIS pay for this?
I’ve hope that your services are not out of pocket. Please help us bring our mother home as soon as possible.
From Sally.
Hi Sally,
Thank you so much for sharing your mother’s situation. It sounds to me like your mother is more than ready for a discharge with Intensive Care at Home. If she’s on a ventilator with a trach and she can’t be weaned off the ventilator, she can definitely go home.
You haven’t mentioned anything that she’s not stable. I presume she’s medically stable, not on any inotropes or vasopressors. If that’s the case, we can take her home fairly quickly. We need a few weeks to set up a roster, of course, but that can be sorted out and then she can go home with 24 hours Intensive Care at Home nursing under the NDIS. The NDIS will pay for nursing services at home for ventilation and tracheostomy.
The best next step is really for us to talk to the hospital about discharge planning, speak to the NDIS about the funding, and then we can get the ball rolling. But there is definitely hope for you and for your mother to go home as quickly as possible, leave ICU behind, you and your mother. I can understand that she would be depressed and doesn’t have any quality of life there in ICU and she needs to go home as quickly as possible.
Please get in touch with us if you have any other questions and then we can get the ball rolling.
Thank you.
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.