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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, including home TPN.
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
Quick Tip for Families in Intensive Care: Can my Wife be Weaned off the Tracheostomy in ICU?
Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from Intensive Care at Home with another quick tip for families in intensive care and for families outside of intensive care. It’s a tip for anyone that’s dealing with a ventilator and a tracheostomy, and is in need of intensive care or Intensive Care at Home.
So I’ve got a question today from Peter who asks, “Is it possible for my wife to be weaned off the tracheostomy in ICU?” Now, what a great question to ask Peter. And I guess preceding that question is really before your wife can be weaned off the tracheostomy, she needs to be weaned off the ventilator.
Now, either can be done in ICU, but neither might be able to be done in ICU. So it really depends on your wife’s situation. It’s sort of a very relevant question, but to a degree, it’s also a very broad question because it really depends on, why your wife had a tracheostomy? Why she had a ventilator? What’s stopping her from coming off the tracheostomy at the moment? Can she not swallow? Is she at risk of aspiration? Did she have a stroke? It really depends on your wife’s unique situation.
So there are a number of questions that need to be answered. But even if she can’t be weaned off the ventilator, you should be looking at Intensive Care at Home where we can help you take your wife home with a tracheostomy and she can be weaned off the tracheostomy at home. And if she can’t be weaned off the tracheostomy in ICU or at home, she can have 24-hour nursing care at home, which are the recommendations from the mechanical home ventilation guidelines.
Those guidelines are researched and evidence-based that anybody leaving intensive care with a ventilator and or tracheostomy needs to be looked after by an intensive care nurse with a minimum of two years’ intensive care experience at home. And then it’s actually safe.
Unfortunately, we have seen clients pass away in the community with the tracheostomy/ventilator, where we were only doing night shifts and we were only funded for night shifts. And unfortunately, clients passed away during the day because families and support workers just simply couldn’t manage medical emergency. That’s how serious it is. But we can help you with all of that. And we can make sure that the funding is there for you.
We are cutting the cost of an intensive care bed by about 50%. We’re providing much better quality of life for clients at home compared to an intensive care stay. And we can help you with that.
If you are in Australia, you should contact us also for NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) funding. We also have our own NDIS specialist support coordinator. You should contact us at intensivecareathome.com, call us on one of the numbers on the top of the website, or simply send us an email to [email protected].
Like this video, comment below what questions and insights you have and what you want to see next. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for updates for families in intensive care and click the notification bell.
If you want a medical record review, click on the link for medical record review.
Also check out our membership for families in intensive care at intensivecaresupport.org.
This is Patrik Hutzel from Intensive Care at Home, and I will talk to you in a few days.
Take care.