Hello and welcome to another Intensive Care at Home live stream. Thank you so much for joining this live stream, and thank you so much for all your support. If you like these videos and the videos that are published during the week, like, comment, subscribe and, more importantly, share these videos with anyone that those videos can help.

Today’s topic is recruiting critical care nurses for complex home care, why it is so hard and what it means for your family. Today is a slightly different format than usual, because today I also want to talk about some of our challenges, which is certainly recruiting critical care nurses for complex home care.

My name is Patrik Hutzel from Intensive Care at Home at intensivecareathome.com. I have worked in critical care nursing for over 25 years in three different countries, where I worked as a nurse manager for over five years in intensive care, and I started Intensive Care at Home in 2012 here in Australia — that is how long we have been operating. I have worked in ICU (Intensive Care Unit) and critical care nursing for over 25 years in three different countries, where I worked as a nurse unit manager in intensive care for over five years, and I was also part of the first intensive care at home nursing service in Germany in the early 2000s — Brambring and Jaschke. Big shout out to Brambring and Jaschke. I was part of pioneering intensive care at home in Germany in the early 2000s, which gave me the confidence and enabled me to start a similar service in 2012 in Australia, after I had concluded some traveling in my nursing career across the UK and Australia, seeing a gap in the market.

I also provide consulting and advocacy for families in intensive care on our sister site, intensivecarehotline.com, and with both organizations, we have been in business for over ten years, making a massive difference to our clients and their families, having saved many lives for our clients and their families. You can verify that on our testimonial section on our websites at intensivecareathome.com and intensivecarehotline.com. We have also done interviews with some of our clients on our podcast.

With Intensive Care at Home, we provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomies at home as a genuine alternative to long-term stay in intensive care. We provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated adults and children on BiPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure) and CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) — non-invasive ventilation without tracheostomy at home. We provide tracheostomy care with 24/7 critical care nurses — tailor-made solutions for adults and children with tracheostomies without ventilation at home. We provide ventilation weaning whenever medically appropriate, tracheostomy weaning whenever medically appropriate, and cough assist management at home. We provide home TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition), home IV fluids, home IV antibiotics, home IV potassium, magnesium, and other electrolyte infusions. We provide central line, PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) line, Hickman’s line, and port management at home — managing all these lines at home similar to an ICU. We provide IDC (Indwelling Catheter) and SPC (Suprapubic Catheter) management at home, nasogastric tube and nasojejunostomy tube management at home, as well as PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy) and PEJ (Percutaneous Endoscopic Jejunostomy) tube management at home. We also provide palliative care services whenever appropriate and wished for by families or patients. We also provide Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) support coordination, and we also provide TAC (Transport Accident Commission) and WorkSafe case management.

Every week, families in intensive care or out of intensive care with Intensive Care at Home ask me some version of the same question. They ask: Patrik, why is it so hard to find a genuinely qualified ICU or critical care registered nurse, also known as CCRNs (Critical Care Registered Nurses), for home ventilation care, for complex home ventilation care, for complex care in general at home, and why do so many providers end up simply sending support workers instead?

You would have heard me saying over and over again on this channel that support workers for our clients are nothing less than a death sentence in the absence of critical care registered nurses. These are all fair questions, and it is one the entire home ventilation and complex care industry in Australia needs to answer honestly.

Today, in this video and later in the show notes in the published article, I am pulling back the curtain on the real structural reasons critical care nurse recruitment for home care is so difficult, why so many providers quietly downgrade to unqualified staff to fill the gaps, and what that downgrade has already cost at least one family in Australia — and many others as well. One family I can freely talk about publicly, and that is Noah Johnston — and I will come to that as I go along.

I also want to welcome our viewers on replay, because I know we have a lot of viewers that watch these videos on replay. I also want to welcome our international audience. I know we have viewers watching in the US (United States), in Canada, in India, in the UK (United Kingdom), all over the world. At the time of this recording, I am in Melbourne, Australia.

With Intensive Care at Home, we are operating all around Australia in all states and territories, in all major metropolitan areas, and regional and remote areas. If you are watching this and you are in the US, in Canada, in the UK, in New Zealand, wherever you are, and you are interested in Intensive Care at Home, we welcome you to reach out to us on our website at intensivecareathome.com — either call us or email us at [email protected], or you can also schedule a call with me by clicking the Schedule Appointment button, because we can help you in those countries as well.

Why Recruiting Genuine CCRNs for Home Ventilation Care and Intensive Care at Home Can Be Difficult

Invasive ventilation with tracheostomy, non-invasive ventilation with BiPAP or CPAP, and tracheostomy care without ventilation, home TPN, central line management, PICC line management, Hickman’s line management, and port management at home are not personal care tasks. They are ICU and critical care nursing tasks that in a hospital would only ever be performed by an ICU or critical care registered nurse.

Recruiting for that skill set in a home setting, often for one family, one client, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year — is a completely different challenge to rostering an ICU ward. This video is also for ICU nurses and ICU doctors interested in how we operate and how we can help get their clients home from ICU — how we can do what even ICUs find hard to do, which is recruit, train, and retain staff, because our staff are our biggest asset here.

Why is it a completely different challenge to rostering an ICU? Let’s look at some reasons.

The first reason is that genuine CCRNs are a small, highly specialized workforce. Most are employed in hospital ICUs where they have peer support, a multidisciplinary team on tap, and equipment on hand at the drop of a hat.

The second reason is that Intensive Care at Home means working solo in someone’s lounge room or bedroom without a doctor down the corridor and without another nurse to have ready on standby immediately.

Number three: 24/7 rosters for a single client require multiple full-time equivalent CCRNs per person — not one nurse, but a whole roster of properly credentialled, competency-assessed nurses that have the confidence and the skill set to work independently in someone’s home, which is a completely different skill set compared to someone working in an ICU embedded in a whole team. We have a team here, but we cannot just deploy five other nurses at the drop of a hat to a client.

Next, rural and regional placements make recruitment even harder because the pool of ICU-experienced nurses willing to relocate or travel is small. In regional and remote Australia, there are not many CCRNs because there are not many ICUs or ED (Emergency Department) departments in those areas, so we have to incentivize our staff to go to regional or remote areas. We also have to negotiate higher rates with funding bodies so that we can incentivize our staff to go to those regional or remote areas.

That means wages, training, investment, and clinical governance all cost more for genuine CCRNs than for general registered nurses, community registered nurses, or support workers — which is exactly why some providers try to cut corners. This is why their clients go back to hospital all the time or they die, and there is no accountability. You cannot replace an ICU nurse with a general registered nurse, with a community registered nurse, or let alone with a support worker. That is like flying an airplane with the cabin crew instead of the pilot.

Here is another reason why it is much harder and requires much more specialized skills to maintain rosters at Intensive Care at Home. In a 40-bed ICU, let’s say you need 45 staff per shift — you roster 45 staff in the morning, 45 in the afternoon, 45 at night. At Intensive Care at Home, we need staff in different locations, and we are still doing the same work by running a community-based ICU. We need staff in different locations — some in the Melbourne area for different clients, the same in Sydney, for example. That is a massive challenge. You cannot just put names on a piece of paper and say the shifts are filled. It has to be client-centric. The clients only want certain staff, which makes it more challenging — but also more rewarding.

The Shortcuts the Industry Takes and Why They Are Dangerous

Genuine CCRN recruitment is hard and expensive. Some homecare and NDIS providers quietly try to substitute support workers, PCAs (Personal Care Assistants), or minimally trained staff for what should be ICU-level nursing care. On paper the client is staffed. In reality, the person managing a tracheostomy or ventilator overnight may have had a few days of training — including online training — and no ICU background at all, not even a nursing background.

I want to be very clear about why these matters, using a real, well-documented case as a warning.

Noah Johnston was one of our clients who passed away on 8 December 2025, and it is a warning the whole industry needs to hear. A tracheostomy tube displacement in December 2025 with no critical care registered nurse present at the time is a tragedy that should never have happened, and it is a direct illustration of what goes wrong when complex home ventilation and tracheostomy care is not staffed with genuine, competency-assessed critical care registered nurses around the clock.

I refer to this case and many other cases regularly — not to sensationalise it — but because families need to understand a tracheostomy can become a life-threatening emergency in seconds. Tube displacements, ventilation disconnection, mucus plugging, and accidental decannulation are not rare theoretical risks. They are exactly the kind of emergency a CCRN is trained to recognize and manage immediately, and exactly the kind of emergency an undertrained registered nurse without ICU experience, an undertrained community registered nurse without ICU experience, and definitely an undertrained disability support worker cannot safely manage alone.

This is the human cost of the recruitment shortcut. It is why at Intensive Care at Home we have never diluted our staffing model to solve a recruitment problem, and why families need to ask any provider they are considering exactly who will be in their home overnight.

You also need to check what other providers might be putting on their websites — they often copy and paste from our website. We have been around since 2012. It is one thing to copy and paste what has been published here since 2012. It is another thing to maintain it, and we have maintained it since 2012. When I look those providers up, not only have they infringed on copyrights, but they have not even got any job ads running — which means we have a unique ability to attract hundreds of years of critical care nursing experience combined at Intensive Care at Home.

What that means is we have built the recruitment team, the education team, and the maintenance team to not only recruit, train, and retain critical care nurses in the home care environment. Our staff turnover is below industry average. Thank you to everybody that is working here at Intensive Care at Home — whether it is our nursing team, our roster team, our finance team, our HR team, our NDIS support coordinators, or TAC case managers.

A lot of ICUs have a very high staff turnover because they do not create good teams. It is very rare that ICUs can retain their staff long-term, because they are not empowering their nurses the way we do here. Our nurses can work independently, make their own decisions, and we all work towards a common goal. We are nurse-led, which gives nurses a lot more independence than in an ICU where it is often medically led. It was one of the reasons I started Intensive Care at Home — because we as nurses can think for ourselves. We always follow medical orders, of course, but we can think for ourselves what is best for a patient and their family, which is why we created Intensive Care at Home.

It is clear that the promise of Intensive Care at Home and the delivery of it resonates with patients, families, but also with our team — and with some ICUs that are referring to us on an ongoing basis.

Why Intensive Care at Home Only Operates with Genuine Critical Care Registered Nurses

I cannot call our service Intensive Care at Home and then send support workers. That would simply be a lie. We have always been true to ourselves and have always followed our mission, which is providing intensive care at home — and that can only be delivered with critical care nurses.

Every single nurse we place is a genuine ICU or critical care registered nurse — not a registered nurse without ICU experience, not a community registered nurse without ICU experience, and definitely not a disability support worker or personal care assistant.

We solve the recruitment challenge properly through rigorous credentialling, competency assessments, ongoing clinical governance, and a recruitment pipeline built specifically for critical care nursing — not for general registered nurses, not for community registered nurses, and definitely not for disability support workers — because the disability support worker model is what contributed to Noah Johnston’s death and the deaths of others I cannot name here, but of whom I have firsthand knowledge. We had informed the NDIA (National Disability Insurance Agency) as well as the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission about pending deaths if the NDIA did not fund 24-hour critical care registered nurses. We have all the evidence. Those families have decided not to speak up publicly, but the incidents are all there, and the NDIS as well as the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission knows exactly which clients I am talking about.

Everything we do is evidence-based as well as third-party accredited. That is also another reason why we can recruit, train, and retain critical care registered nurses — because they find a similar infrastructure here compared to an ICU.

All other providers who put on their websites that they can do intensive care at home and copy and paste are not third-party accredited for intensive care at home. In 2012, we started getting third-party accredited for intensive care at home nursing, and we have maintained that all the way through. We continue to be the only third-party accredited intensive care at home nursing service in Australia in 2026. We are ISO 9001:2015 accredited for intensive care at home nursing, and we are also NDIS registered for intensive care at home nursing. That sets out exactly what safe, clinically sound home ventilation care, complex care, and tracheostomy care — PEG tube, nasogastric tube, nasojejunostomy tube, SPC, IDC, TPN, IV fluids, IV antibiotics — needs to look like, similar to an ICU in a hospital. We can deliver the same level of care at home.

Not only is our service third-party accredited and NDIS registered, it is also evidence-based. When you look on our website at intensivecareathome.com, you will find the Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines, which set out exactly what safe, clinically sound home ventilation and complex care should look like — exclusively with 24-hour critical care registered nurses. These evidence-based Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines are one of the reasons — not the only reason — why we are third-party accredited and NDIS registered for intensive care at home nursing.

It is also fair to say that we have built the intellectual property and the infrastructure for intensive care at home nursing from scratch. We had to learn, adapt, and pay attention to what the clients want and what the staff want to make it safe and sustainable.

Third-party accreditation is not a marketing badge. It is an independent third party confirming that our recruitment, training, competency assessments, and clinical governance actually meet the standards this kind of care demands — the standards that prevent a Noah Johnston-type outcome from happening again. Because every time those standards and the standards of the evidence-based Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines were not met, that is when people have died. You cannot take any shortcuts in this industry. To provide a genuine alternative to a long-term stay in intensive care — to provide a community-based ICU — you need 24-hour critical care nurses. No shortcuts. And you need clinical governance.

Funding the Right Staffing Model

Whether it is NDIS, TAC, WorkSafe, iCare New South Wales, DVA (Department of Veterans’ Affairs), private health insurance, departments of health, or Hospital in the Home — one of the reasons the cheaper support worker model persists is funding pressure. Families and case managers are often trying to stretch a budget, and a support worker costs less per hour than a CCRN. But when the task is managing an ICU patient — tracheostomy, ventilator, BiPAP, CPAP, TPN — that saving comes at the cost of safety and has cost many lives over the years.

We help families navigate this properly because we also provide Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS support coordination as well as TAC and WorkSafe case management, to make sure funding is structured around genuine 24/7 critical care registered nursing care — not around whatever staffing model is cheapest to fill. If you fill the staffing model around cost and not around clinical need, people will die. People have died. And people will continue to die for anybody who is trying to take shortcuts.

What You Should Ask Any Provider Before You Engage with Them

Ask them who exactly will be in the home overnight — a critical care registered nurse with ICU experience, or a disability support worker, general registered nurse, or community registered nurse. Do not take any shortcuts.

Ask why other providers cannot attract hundreds of years of critical care nursing experience combined like we do. We employ hundreds of years of critical care registered nursing experience combined because people want to work for us. You want to work for a service like Intensive Care at Home — not for another service that claims they can do intensive care at home but has no track record whatsoever.

Ask whether the provider is independently third-party accredited for intensive care at home nursing, or whether this is just a claim on their website. There are many providers out there who claim they can do intensive care at home nursing, but when you dig deeper, they do not even have a clinical governance structure. The business owners are not clinical. They have no ICU nursing background. They have not gone through accreditation like we have since 2012. They have not even spoken to auditors about what it takes to get third-party accredited for intensive care at home nursing.

Ask whether the provider follows evidence-based, published home ventilation guidelines. Do they even know they exist?

Ask whether the provider can support Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS support coordination, TAC, or WorkSafe case management to fund the right level of care — not a cut-down or watered-down version.

Ask them whether their claims about intensive care at home come from their own clinical experience, or whether they have just copied and pasted from our website. Ask whether they have a network of critical care nurses built over more than a decade of reputation and service delivery across many locations around the country. Ask whether they have done all the groundwork and have experience in successfully advocating for 24-hour nursing care — because if they had not, they would not exist.

Ask whether they have a YouTube channel where they can talk about intensive care at home and answer questions for families day in and day out. I can guarantee not many of them do. They simply do not have the expertise. They have not built the network, the infrastructure, or the teams to make that happen. To talk to an audience on YouTube and answer questions for families in intensive care, you need not only the knowledge and the experience to talk about it freely, but also an infrastructure in the background.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the real difference between a CCRN, a community registered nurse, a general registered nurse, and a disability support worker?

Critical care registered nurses are very rare. They must complete a Bachelor of Nursing, then at least another two years in ICU, where they simultaneously often work towards a postgraduate critical care nursing qualification. That takes at least five years. The barriers to entry to even work for us are very high — but that comes with skill and experience. The minimum requirement here is two years of ICU experience and a postgraduate critical care nursing qualification. About 50 to 75% of our nurses hold a postgraduate critical care nursing qualification, similar to an ICU. Some of our nurses have 20 to 25 years of ICU experience.

General registered nurses work in hospitals, aged care, or disability services but have never worked in ICU — which means they are not tracheostomy or ventilator competent, no matter what they tell you. If you have not worked in ICU for at least two years, you are not tracheostomy or ventilator competent. High standards are non-negotiable here, and they need to be.

Community registered nurses work mainly in the community. If they have never worked in ICU, they are not ventilator or tracheostomy competent. None of these nurses, generally speaking, are PICC line competent, TPN competent, or central line competent. These are all ICU nursing skills and ICU nursing skills only.

A disability support worker — with all respect to disability support workers — may have worked in an entirely different field the week before and is now being trained on an ICU patient and let loose to look after ICU patients in the community. People have died under this model. The NDIS sits back and keeps signing off on NDIS plans for vulnerable clients to be looked after by disability support workers. Noah Johnston has died and so have others. The minute a tracheostomy tube or ventilator displaces, the minute there is mucus plugging or accidental decannulation, a general registered nurse, a community registered nurse, and certainly a support worker would not know what to do — and that is when people end up in hospital or they die. Our clients want to be at home permanently and predictably, and that is exactly what we make happen for them.

Is Intensive Care at Home really the only third-party accredited provider for this kind of care in Australia?

Yes, absolutely. I encourage you to do your own research. In 2026, we are the only third-party accredited and NDIS registered nursing provider for intensive care at home nursing in Australia, independently verified against ISO 9001:2015 quality standards and NDIS standards. You can review our accreditation directly at intensivecareathome.com/accreditation-quality.

To get third-party accredited and NDIS registered for intensive care at home, it is quite an undertaking. It is very expensive, but our standards are very high and they continue to be very high — which is why it is so difficult to copy us and obtain that third-party accreditation. We had to build the intellectual property from scratch, adapt, modify, learn, and tweak, making sure it is all about safety so that we can not only pass, but also maintain our accreditation and NDIS registration status.

Can NDIS funding cover genuine 24/7 critical care registered nurses instead of support workers?

Yes, absolutely it can — otherwise we would not exist and I would not be making these videos. When funding and supports are structured correctly and evidence is structured correctly, this is exactly where our Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS support coordination comes in, making sure the funding plan matches the clinical need rather than defaulting to the cheapest staffing option that costs lives.

What actually happened in the Noah Johnston case and why do you keep referencing it?

Noah Johnston experienced a tracheostomy tube displacement and ventilator disconnection on 8 December 2025, with no critical care registered nurse present, because the NDIS chose to cut his funding. His case was at the AAT (Administrative Appeals Tribunal) waiting for a hearing — and that is why he died. The disability support worker present could not recognize what was happening because they are not ICU nurses.

I keep referencing it because it is a real, documented example of what can go wrong — and what will go wrong — when complex ventilation or tracheostomy care is not staffed with genuine ICU nurses around the clock 24/7. I do not want to sensationalize it, but families deserve to understand the stakes. The reason I can talk about Noah Johnston freely is that his mom, Kylie, chose to go to the media — and rightly so. The NDIS needed to be called out on its failings because Noah died, and the NDIS failed Noah. Others were failed by the NDIA as well.

I have highlighted every single one of those cases prior to the client passing away. We knew it would happen if the NDIA did not fund 24-hour critical care registered nurses. Some families were too scared, too intimidated by the NDIS to speak up, and their family members passed away — and that is extremely sad. The NDIA should not be intimidating these families. They should be helpful. In Noah Johnston’s case, money was saved and a life was lost. Is that the society we want to live in, in 2026 in Australia?

Do you provide TAC and WorkSafe case management as well as NDIS support coordination?

Yes, absolutely. Alongside Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS support coordination, we provide TAC and WorkSafe case management for clients whose care needs arise from a transport accident or workplace injury.

How do I get started or get a second opinion on my current provider?

Reach out to us at intensivecareathome.com. Call us on one of the Australian numbers at the top of our website, or call me directly on my mobile on 0410 942 230 — that is again 0410 942 230. You can also book a call with me on the website by clicking the Schedule Appointment button, or send an email to [email protected]. For those watching from the US, Canada, the UK, India, or anywhere else in the world — international phone numbers are also available on the website.

The Bottom Line

Recruiting genuine critical care registered nurses for home intensive care nursing — for ventilation, tracheostomy, IV fluids, TPN, and everything else — is difficult. That is real, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the answer to that difficulty can never be quietly substituting a support worker for an ICU nurse when someone’s life depends on tracheostomy or ventilation skills being managed correctly.

From over 14 years of intensive care at home nursing, here is another lesson. In the first ten years we were advertising for ICU nurses constantly. Then COVID hit and it became even more difficult. We could not find enough staff in the early days. I think it was a combination of people initially not trusting those ads — thinking intensive care at home could not work, that it would go away soon. But we persisted and demonstrated a model that was not formally established in Australia. We have clearly succeeded with that model and we continue to succeed with it, hand in hand with our clients.

Now that people know it is a proven model — for me it was always proven because I worked with the model in Germany 25 years ago — the ICU nursing workforce here trusts it. If you are an ICU nurse watching this, you want to work with the market leader, not with a copycat who claims they can do intensive care at home but has not made a single video about it or interviewed a single client.

Coming back to Noah Johnston — why are other providers not advocating for 24-hour critical care nurses the way we have been doing here since 2012? The bottom line is they do not know what they are talking about.

CCRNs are needed 24 hours a day. That is the very reason Intensive Care at Home exists. Solve the recruitment challenge the right way — with 24/7 genuine critical care registered nurses for invasive ventilation with tracheostomy, non-invasive ventilation with BiPAP and CPAP without tracheostomy, and tracheostomy care without ventilation, as well as home TPN, home IV fluids, home IV antibiotics, IV potassium and magnesium infusions, central line, PICC line, Hickman’s line, and port management at home — as well as ventilation weaning when medically appropriate, tracheostomy weaning when medically appropriate, cough assist management, IDC and SPC management, nasogastric and nasojejunostomy tube management, PEG and PEJ tube management at home, and palliative care management at home when families or patients want that pathway.

If you like these videos, give them a thumbs up, share them with your friends and family, subscribe to the YouTube channel, click the notification bell, and thank you once again to everyone watching — including those watching on replay. Take care, everyone, and stay safe.

With all of that said, with Intensive Care at Home, we are currently sending our critical care nurses into the home 24 hours a day. Therefore, we are providing a genuine alternative to long-term stay in intensive care for:

• Ventilation
• Tracheostomy
• Home BiPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure) and CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure)
• Tracheostomy care without ventilation
• home TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition)
• Home IV potassium
• Home IV magnesium
• Home IV antibiotics
• Home IV fluids

We’re providing:

• Cough assist management at home
• Ventilation weaning management at home
• central line, PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) line, Hickman’s line as well as port management at home
• nasogastric tube, nasojejunostomy tube, PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy), PEJ (Percutaneous Endoscopic Jejunostomy) tube management at home
• IDC (Indwelling Catheter) and SPC (Suprapubic Catheter) management at home
• Palliative care services at home

We’re also sending our critical care nurses into the home for emergency department bypass services. We have done so successfully as part of the Western Sydney Local Health District’s In Touch program, saving approximately $2,000 per patient that we keep at home instead of them going into an emergency department.

That also means we’re in a position to cut the cost of an ICU bed by around 50%. An intensive care bed costs between $5,000 to $10,000 per bed day depending on location. Intensive Care at Home costs approximately 50% of that, and we’re freeing up the most sought-after bed in the hospital, which is the ICU bed. Most importantly, we’re improving the quality of life for patients and their families, which is a win-win situation for all stakeholders.

Our Coverage and Accreditation

With Intensive Care at Home, we’re currently operating all around Australia, in all major capital cities, as well as in all regional and rural areas. We are an NDIS approved service provider all around Australia, TAC (Transport Accident Commission) and WorkSafe in Victoria as well as the Department of Veterans Affairs all around Australia.

We’re also ISO 9001:2015 accredited. Our clients and we as a service provider have also received funding through public hospitals, private health funds as well as departments of health.

We are the only service provider in Australia that has achieved third-party accreditation for Intensive Care at Home nursing in 2025. We have been achieving this high level of accreditation since 2012. No other provider in Australia has achieved the Intensive Care at Home level of accreditation in the community and has created more intellectual property when it comes to Intensive Care at Home nursing than we have.

This puts us in a position to employ hundreds of years of critical care nursing experience combined in the community. No other service provider in 2025 employs a higher skill level in the community than we do. And that enables us to look after the highest acuity adults and children in the community in Australia safely.

If You Need Help

If you’re at home already and you’re watching this or you’re stuck in an ICU and you realize that you don’t have the right level of support, I can give you many examples where we helped clients with funding, how we advocate for funding. We had to advocate successfully for funding from our first case study to many other case studies where we had to advocate successfully for funding with the right evidence of course because it is crystal clear that disability support workers for example or registered nurses without ICU experience cannot look after ventilated clients at home whether adults or children with or without a tracheostomy and it’s simply dangerous and negligent.

There are plenty of examples where clients with support worker models or even RN (registered nurse) models without ICU experience have died at home and I have evidence to back up everything that I’m saying here because it’s a bit like flying the airplane with a cabin crew instead of the pilot and it could simply be deadly.

This can be avoided by having simply 24-hour critical care nurses at home because our clients are at high risk of medical emergencies or worse without critical care nurses 24 hours. This is actually also evidence-based in the community and is documented in our evidence-based Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines on our website at intensivecareathome.com.

Think about it: in an intensive care unit in a hospital, you wouldn’t have support workers or general registered nurses looking after a critical care patient on a ventilator with a tracheostomy. So why would anyone in their right mind do that in a home care environment where there are fewer resources?

Clients that have found us have been at home long-term predictably and permanently with critical care nurses. Their alternative would have been to either die or stay in ICU long-term, and our clients don’t go back to ICU. They stay at home permanently and predictably and the insurance bodies save half of the cost of an ICU. But it’s a win-win situation all around.

We can do the same for you if you’re stuck in ICU or if you’re not safe at home, which includes the advocacy for funding and the network that goes along with it. We have always successfully advocated for our clients or we have the network to successfully advocate for you and for your family member, otherwise we wouldn’t be in business. The same again is applicable for those stuck in an ICU which is similar to many of our, if not most of our cases.

Our Support Coordination Services

This is also why we are providing Level 2 and Level 3 NDIS support coordination. We have a team of experienced NDIS support coordinators, and they have a wealth of knowledge. We’re also providing TAC case management and WorkSafe case management in Victoria with Lucy McCotter.

If you’re an NDIS support coordinator or a case manager or a social worker from another organization or a hospital watching this and you’re looking for nursing care for your participants, please reach out to us as well. If you’re looking for funding for nursing care for your participants and you don’t know how to go about it and how to advocate for it, what evidence to provide, I encourage you to reach out to us as well. We have the network to make that happen. We will help you with the right level of funding and with the right level of advocacy.

We’re also providing NDIS specialist nursing assessments done by critical care nurses with a legal nurse consulting background.

Join Our Team

If you are a critical care nurse and you’re looking for a career change and you want to join a very progressive, dynamic, successful, and high-performing team of critical care nurses in the community, we are employing hundreds of years of critical care nursing experience combined.

If you’re looking for a career change, we’re currently hiring for jobs for critical care nurses in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Albury-Wodonga, Bendigo, Geelong, Warragul, and also in Wyelangta in Victoria.

If you have worked in critical care nursing for a minimum of two years, adult ICU, pediatric ICU, ED and you have already completed a postgraduate critical care nursing qualification, we will be absolutely delighted hearing from you.

I have a disclaimer though: Because we are offering tailor-made solutions for our clients which includes regular staff, our clients do also want the same staff coming over and over again because they are so vulnerable and so special. That’s why we need regular, reliable staff.

If you’re looking for agency work where you can come and go, this will not be the right fit for you. We’re looking for consistency and our clients are looking for consistency. So please only apply with us if you can give us regular and consistent availabilities for shifts and you’re really keen on building relationships with us and with our clients. Reliability is also a must.

For Medical Professionals and Healthcare Executives

If you’re an intensive care specialist or an ED specialist, we also want to hear from you. We’re currently expanding our medical team as well.

We can also help you eliminate your bed blocks in your ICU and in your ED for your long-term patients or for your regularly readmitting patients with our critical care nursing team at home. We’re here to help to take the pressure off your ICU and ED beds. In most cases, you won’t even pay for it. Even if you do pay for it, it is so much more cost-effective than what you’re paying for in ICU and ED settings, and you get the same level of care and simply more patient and family satisfaction because you also want to partner with your consumers.

If you are a hospital executive watching this, we can help you free up your ICU and ED beds.

International Support

If you’re in the U.S. or in the UK and you’re watching this and you need help, we want to hear from you as well. We can help you there privately with one-on-one consulting and with hiring nurses privately.

Once again, our website is intensivecareathome.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website or simply send us an email to [email protected].

If you like my videos, click the like button, subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families with Intensive Care at Home and intensive care. Click the like button, click the notification bell, and share this video with anyone who has a family member in intensive care long-term or needs to see this.

Thank you so much for watching.

This is Patrik Hutzel from intensivecareathome.com and I’ll talk to you in a few days.

Take care for now.