Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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,
10 THINGS THAT NEED TO BE IN PLACE BEFORE INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME!
You can check out last week’s blog by clicking on the link below this video:
https://intensivecareathome.com/10-things-that-need-to-be-in-place-before-intensive-care-at-home/
In today’s blog post, I want to answer a question from one of our clients and the question today is
Quick Tip for Families in ICU: Helping Patients and Families in Intensive Care to Go Home During COVID-19!
Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from Intensive Care at Home where we provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated, adults and 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 this video, I want to talk about how we can help families and patients and intensive care units to free up some much needed intensive care capacity. And I mean, there’s a shortage of intensive care beds at the moment, all around the world because of the COVID 19 pandemic. And many patients ending up in ICU on ventilators, often on ECMO, prone position, they’re ending up in prolonged induced comas, often medically paralyzed with medications and that delays and prolongs their recovery time if they survive. And that often leaves them with a tracheostomy. And there are often many weeks going by until the patients can be weaned off the ventilator. Sometimes many months go by, in some situations, patients may not be able to be weaned off the ventilator at all and they’re unable to leave intensive care.
Now on top of that, you have the added-on complexity that at the moment, many intensive care units limit the number of visitors in intensive care or you can’t visit at all. It depends on local health services on their policies. It depends on Department of Health policies and so forth. But the reality is that many families in intensive care are locked out of intensive care or have very limited visitation time with their loved ones in intensive care. And that’s a dilemma in and of itself. I mean, there’s enough research out there to know that family involvement, when it comes to patients in intensive care is a desirable thing. It helps improve outcomes and so forth. But again, with the current situation many families are locked out of intensive care with limited or no visitation time.
Now what does that have to do with Intensive Care at Home? Well, quite simple, once a patient is stable, but is still on a tracheostomy and ventilation, is off inotropes, is off sedatives and they’re still being weaned or there is no end in sight of the weaning. We can help them by taking them home, get them out of ICU and improve their quality of life at home. Instead of intensive care, patients can be looked after in the comfort of their own home rather than in an ICU that currently is full of COVID. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re here in Australia, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, doesn’t whether you’re in the US, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the UK. It seems to be the same all over the world. We have inquiries from all over the world for our service. And you know, what people are reporting from intensive care units is the same. They’re locked out, limited visiting times, if any, no visiting times at all, and families are more or less desperate to take their loved ones home.
And again, that is what we can help you with. It takes a little bit of effort to get a patient home from intensive care to Intensive Care at Home, but it’s certainly doable. You need a ventilator, you probably need an oxygen concentrate. You probably need some oxygen cylinders. You need a monitor, you need a couple of ventilators. You need a couple of suction machines. You probably need a hospital bed or a special care bed. You need a monitor, you need spare tracheostomies and so forth, and we are very experienced in setting this up for our client and we can help you with that.
So my message to you today is really, contact us at intensivecareathome.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website, or simply send an email to [email protected] and I can then let you know how we can help you full disclosure. We are predominantly in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. However, we have inquiries from all over the world. We’re not in the United States yet. We’re not in the UK yet, but we’re certainly planning to go there because again, we have so many inquiries from all over the world for our service.
And also a message to our critical care nurses that are watching this video. If you are a critical care nurse, and you are tired from all the stress in intensive care, especially at the moment with the pandemic and you’re looking for a career change. You should contact us as well. We are hiring in Melbourne, in the Melbourne metropolitan area, but also in Sydney and in Brisbane. We’re also going into country Victoria and the Warragul area, specifically Warragul Trafalgar, Trida, Moe and in Drouin, we have a large number of clients in that area. So if you are interested in making a career change, getting out of a busy, intensive care unit, that’s full of COVID, we probably have a better alternative whilst you can still use your skills. So contact us how we can help you.
www.intensivecareathome.com/careers
And also we can help you with the funding and for hospitals as well. It’s a win-win for everyone. We are freeing up your ICU bed that is in high demand. And with that high demand, we can free up your ICU bed and we can cut the cost of an intensive care bed by around 50%. It’s a win-win for everyone.
You know, this week I had actually an intensive care unit contact me and asked me whether we have staff to work in their ICU. And my response to the ICU was, well, we are very busy. We don’t really have any spare staff to work in hospitals. My response to the ICU was, well, why can’t we help you taking some of your patients home and therefore you won’t need our staff in intensive care. And we can focus on our area of expertise, which is to provide services at home for long-term intensive care patients, right? So, and we are working on that with the ICU and take the next steps.
So that is my message for today. Thank you for watching this video.
Now, again, if you have a loved one in intensive care and you want to go home with our service and if you want to find out how to get funding and how it all works, again, please contact us on one of the numbers on the top of our website, or again, send me an email to [email protected].
Please also have a look at our case studies because there we highlight more about what we can do for our clients, how clients can live at home with ventilation and tracheostomies, or 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 more support for your critically loved one, and you have insufficient support or insufficient funding, we can help you with changing service provider, or we can help you with more staff. We can also help you with how to obtain funding for our service, including NDIS, TAC and the Department of Veteran Affairs, but also getting funding directly through hospitals.
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 Hutzel from Intensive Care at Home, and I’ll see you again next week in another update.
Take care for now, and also like this video and comment below what you want to see next. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for updates for families in intensive care and click the notification bell for the next video.
Take care for now.