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My Mom Needs ICU Nurses at Home for BiPAP so She Can Leave ICU, Can INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME Help?
Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from intensivecareathome.com, where we provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomies. 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, medically complex patients at home, including Home TPN (total parenteral nutrition), Home IV potassium infusions, Home BiPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure), Home CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) as well as IV antibiotics.
We also provide services to clients that are not ventilated but have a tracheostomy. We also provide services at home for port management, Central Line Management, PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) Line Management, as well as Hickman’s line management. We also provide services for palliative care at home. In essence, we’re providing a genuine alternative for long-term stay in intensive care.
Now, in today’s blog, I want to answer a question from Jessica who says,
“Hi Patrik,
My mom is in ICU after a near death incident, and now she requires BiPAP at night.
She currently lives by herself but would need assistance at bedtime and in the morning regarding BiPAP if we were to take her home.
Is this a service Intensive Care at Home can provide?”
Absolutely, it is. Many of our clients are in similar situations, and if she only needs it at night, we can send you nurses overnight. But she will need the critical care nurse overnight. That’s why she’s stuck in ICU at the moment. And you’re already connecting the dots, which is great. What needs to happen next if you want her home, then the critical care nurses are needed during the times when she’s on BiPAP.
Now, if you haven’t checked why she’s on BiPAP? Does she need, for example, high flow nasal prongs during the day, high flow nasal cannula? Or can she be without any respiratory assistance during the day? But if she’s fluctuating or alternating between BiPAP and high flow nasal prongs, she will need a critical care nurses 24 hours a day, which is evidence-based, by the way.
So if you go to our website intensivecareathome.com and you look at the Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines section, you will see that the critical care nurse with a minimum of two years’ critical care nursing experience is needed for anyone, with ventilator, tracheostomy. But even if they’re not having a tracheostomy but need BiPAP, CPAP, they need a critical care nurses 24 hours a day as well, because if she didn’t, why can’t she leave intensive care at the moment.
If she was able to leave intensive care now, she wouldn’t be needing the support you are looking for. So a lot is possible at home, but you need the right support here. Like I said, many of our clients that we have at home, either 24 hours a day, that need BiPAP intermittently have our service 24 hours a day or there are clients that only need the BiPAP overnight, and then they need the intensive care nurses overnight.
I am not talking about sleep apnea here. I’m talking about clients needing BiPAP for a clinical condition such as respiratory failure Type 2 or cerebral palsy or any other conditions that might lead, end-stage lung cancer. Whatever the case may be, that’s when you need the critical care nurse 24 hours a day.
Now also you haven’t mentioned, does your mom need oxygen? It’s one thing to need the BiPAP. But does she need the BiPAP just on room air, or does she need oxygen with that?
Ok, so I hope that answers your question Jessica.
If you have a loved one in intensive care in a similar situation, I encourage you to reach out to us, and we can help you take the same steps, taking your loved one home, or maybe you need to go home, and you’re watching this as a patient yourself, and you want to go home. I encourage you to reach out here to intensivecareathome.com. You can send us an email to [email protected] or simply call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website. Or you might be at home already and you realize you have insufficient support. You don’t have the right provider. I encourage you to reach out to us as well.
And you don’t you don’t need to worry about who’s going to pay for it. Keep in mind there is an economic side of it. An intensive care bed costs $5000 to $6000 per bed day. Intensive Care at Home is about 50% of that cost, so it’s a win-win situation. But more importantly, intensive care beds are in high demand. So, by using Intensive Care at Home, everyone is helping the intensive care unit to free up their, in-demand beds, to free up their in-demand staff, to free up their in-demand equipment. Once again, this is a win-win situation.
Now, with Intensive Care at Home, we are currently operating all around Australia and all major capital cities as well as in regional and rural areas. We are an NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) approved service provider. We are a TAC (Transport Accident Commission) approved service provider in Victoria. ICare in New South Wales, NIISQ (National Injury Insurance Scheme in Queensland). As well as a DVA (Department of Veteran Affairs) approved service provider. We have also received funding through public hospitals, Departments of Health, as well as through private health funds. So please reach out to us if you need help.
And if you are in the U.S. or in the U.K. and you need help, we can help you there privately as well, specifically Texas in the U.S. We’re also providing Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS support coordination, if you need help with that. We’re also providing NDIS nursing assessment, if you need help with that.
And if you are a critical care nurse and you’re looking for a career change, we want to hear from you. If you have worked for a minimum of two years in critical care ICU or ED or pediatric ICU and you ideally have completed a postgraduate critical care qualification. We currently have jobs in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, in Albury Wodonga on the New South Wales Victorian border, in Bendigo, in country Victoria as well as in Warragul in country Victoria, we want to hear from you.
Please also note that we are not an agency. We are looking for a really competent staff that want to work with our clients that want to build relationships with our clients. Please only reach out to us if you are genuinely working for us. We are not an agency. We don’t want people coming and going. We want people that have a real commitment for our clients for the work that we are doing? We don’t want people who just want to come and go and do “agency work”. We are not an agency. We are a service provider that has a tailor-made solution for our clients, and that includes a stable team with the right staff.
And if you are an intensive care specialist, we are currently expanding our medical team as well. And if you’re an intensive care specialist and you have bed blocks in your ICU, which I know you have, then I encourage you to reach out to us as well. We can help you eliminate your bed blocks in ICU and in ED (Emergency Department) by taking your patients home, which also includes palliative care for some patients. And talking about ED, we are also providing an ED bypass service for the Western Sydney Local Area Health District. We send our critical care nurses into the home to avoid emergency department admissions. So if your ED is bed blocked, we can help you eliminate those bed blocks by bypassing ED and by providing some ED services at home.
And if you’re a hospital executive watching this, we also want to hear from you cause once again, we can help you eliminate your bed blocks in ICU and ED. We want to hear from you as well.
And if you are an NDIS Support Coordinator and you’re looking for nursing care for your participants or you’re looking for a nursing assessment for your participants, please reach out to us as well. If you don’t know how to get nursing care through the NDIS, I want you to reach out to us as well.
Please once again reach out at intensivecareathome.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website, or simply send us an email to [email protected].
Thank you so much for watching,
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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.