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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,

HOW TO MAKE INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME FOR YOUR LOVED ONE SAFE AND POSSIBLE! LIVE STREAM!

You can check out last week’s blog by clicking on the link below this video:

https://intensivecareathome.com/how-to-make-intensive-care-at-home-for-your-loved-one-safe-and-possible-live-stream/ 

In today’s blog post, I want to share this quick tip for today.

Saving Lives with 24/7 ICU Nurses for Tracheostomy Clients Per Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines

Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from intensivecareathome.com, where we provide tailor-made solutions for long-term ventilated adults and children with tracheostomy. And where we also provide solutions such as home TPN for our clients and where we send intensive care nurses into the home 24-hours a day for medically complex clients as well.

This is a quick tip today, again, coming back to safety and quality when it comes to long-term ventilated clients with tracheostomy, but also with clients that only have a tracheostomy and are not ventilated.

So I’ve said this many times over again that, we provide services with the evidence-based Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines in mind. And that’s what we practice all day, every day. When you look at the evidence-based home mechanical ventilation guidelines that come out of over 20 years of Intensive Care at Home nursing, that a ventilated or a tracheostomy client can only be at home with an intensive care nurse with a minimum of two years’ intensive care experience. And here today in this video, I provide more evidence that this is accurate.

So, we are currently talking to a client who’s had their loved one in ICU for about six weeks. They’ve now been weaned off the ventilator they’re now ready to go to the hospital ward, with a tracheostomy just on the T-piece. No longer ventilated. Now, most hospital wards cannot look after tracheostomy. Most of the time they need to either go to a respiratory ward, but even on a respiratory ward, they often don’t have intensive care nurses that are tracheostomy-competent.

Again, if you go back to the mechanical home ventilation guidelines that are evidence-based clearly says, that you need an intensive care nurse with a minimum of two years’ intensive care experience, when you look after someone with a tracheostomy outside of intensive care.

So coming back to our client, he went to a hospital floor, it didn’t even take 24-hours that on the hospital floor. They turned him to do pressure area care, to give the patient a wash and so forth, and they dislodged the tracheostomy. They did not hold on to the T-piece when they were turning him. It became dislodged, it caused a massive bleed, and the patient was anti-coagulated, i.e. he was on heparin, and now he’s bounced back into intensive care.

So, we can’t stress this enough that anyone with a tracheostomy really needs 24-hours intensive care nurses with a minimum of two years ICU experience. It’s documented, it’s evidence-based, and yet people, violate best practice guidelines all the time and it’s clearly damaging clients. And I’ve also reported here in these videos that it has killed clients because funding bodies did not make 24-hour nursing care available with intensive care nurses at home. And it’s very sad. But we will not stop advocating here on this channel for what is evidence-based and what saves lives and what improves quality of life.

So that is my quick tip for today.

If you have a loved one in intensive care and you want to take them home, contact us here at intensivecareathome.com. Also, if you have a loved one at home already, but you need intensive care nurses, you should contact us as well on one of the numbers on the top of our website at intensivecareathome.com, or simply send us an email to [email protected].

Please keep in mind, we are an NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme), TAC (Transport Accident Commission) and DVA (Department of Veteran Affairs) approved communities service provider, community nursing service provider in Australia. You should contact us as well. But even for our U.S. and UK audience, you should contact us as well. We can help you one way or another.

Also have a look at our membership for families in intensive care at intensivecaresupport.org. There you have access to me and my team that answers questions 24-hours a day, for families in intensive care.

Like the video, subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families in intensive care and Intensive Care at Home. Share the video with your friends and families. Click the notification bell and comment below what you want to see next, or what questions and insights you have.

Thanks for watching.

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