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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
Questions Answered About Home TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition)
So in today’s blog post, I want to focus on home TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition) because we’re having quite a few inquiries about home TPN lately. And a lot of those inquiries, unfortunately, families come to us and they say, “Look, my loved one, my family member is in the hospital. They are on TPN and the hospital is telling us that their loved one can’t go home unless TPN has been stopped.”
Now, nothing could be further from the truth, with our service, Intensive Care at Home, TPN can be given at home. And we have looked after many clients now at home on TPN, and we currently have clients at home on TPN. The prerequisite obviously is to have a central line, Hickman’s line or a PICC line, and obviously a prescribing doctor that prescribes the TPN, add-ons like Cernevit or sometimes like other electrolytes that can be added on depending on a client’s needs.
Ideally you have a nutritional team overseeing the TPN therapy at home from a hospital, but at the end of the day, with our critical care nurses, we can supply the nurses for home TPN, whether that’s for 24 hours a day TPN, whether it’s for multiple times a week, it really doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, what you need is our skill or the skill of a critical care nurse to hook up the TPN, manage the central line. The same is applicable for IV fluids, but I I’ll discuss that in a separate blog post at some point. And then off you go, no need to stay in hospital.
The funding side of things, if you are in Australia and if you are below the age of 65, you qualify for the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) and you should contact us if you have any questions around that. We can help you with getting funding through the NDIS. If you’re above 65 years of age, the hospitals may pay for it. There could be other funding schemes that you should access. Again, you should be contacting us. There could be private health insurance. If you have that, that might be paying for it. So again, you should definitely contact us.
But I want to keep this brief today, but the essence is home TPN. It’s definitely possible. We’ve shown it many, many times now. And what you need as well is, you need to have a company that’s supplying you with TPN bags. That could be Baxter. It could be Fresenius. Not that I endorse one over the other, but those are two of the companies that can supply TPN bags at home.
Other options might be to talk to your local pharmacy or talk to the hospital pharmacy. They might be able to supply you with TPN as well, but again, we can help you with the supply of TPN bags as well. So don’t let the hospital discourage you and say, you can’t go home whilst you are on TPN or while your loved one is on TPN. Contact us here at Intensive Care at Home, and we’ll help you to take you home.
Take care for now.
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.