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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
The Difference Intensive Care at Home is Making in the Quality of Life for Long-Term Ventilated Patients with tracheostomy!
So, today I want to talk about what difference Intensive Care at Home makes in the quality of life for long-term ventilated clients with tracheostomy. And I want to illustrate that with a case study today.
So, we are currently working with a young man who is in their early twenties. And when we first started working with the young man, we worked in partnership with another service provider, but the other service provider couldn’t keep the clients safe just simply because they had a big issue with staff selection and they couldn’t select the right staff for the client because they, in their mind, were thinking that enrolled nurses or registered nurses without ICU experience could keep a ventilated client safe.
Now, nothing could be further from the truth and I will provide the evidence for that in a minute. But just again, to illustrate that if you look at ICUs, for example, you wouldn’t send an enrolled nurse or a nurse from the general ward or from the general floor into ICU to look after a ventilated patient. That would be like flying an airplane with the cabin crew instead of the pilot.
And the same is applicable in a home care environment where Intensive Care at Home is providing home care services that are evidence-based, according to the “Home Mechanical Ventilation Guidelines.” And this research has clearly shown that the only way you can safely look after a ventilated client at home with a tracheostomy with adults or children, is with intensive care nurses with a minimum of two years ICU experience. Plus, ideally a post-graduate critical care certificate or the equivalent.
And that’s exactly what we’re doing with Intensive Care at Home. That’s all we do. That’s all our clients get. They’re getting an intensive care nurse with a minimum of two years, ICU, pediatric ICU experience. And most of our nurses have a postgraduate qualification as well.
Overall, Intensive Care at Home is currently employing hundreds of years of intensive care nursing experience. And that is what you get. You get the expertise in your home from ICU and therefore we can help you and your family to keep your loved one out of ICU. And this is exactly what we’re doing in this particular scenario with this young man who sustained a C1 spinal injury.
Again, when we first started there, a mixture of enrolled nurses and registered nurses without ICU experience were looking after this young man. And they just couldn’t look after him because they didn’t have the skills, the training or the expertise, and the experience to look after someone on a ventilator.
And quite frankly, again, it keeps coming back that it’s quite dangerous. And it’s like flying the airplane with the cabin crew instead of the pilot.
Now that we are fully engaged with this client, the quality of life for this client has improved dramatically. Previously, there were many gaps in the roster because again, nurses were dropping out. The client was always at high risk of either going back to hospital or even worse. And that has stopped, the client now is living a much better quality of life because we have a stable, intensive care nursing workforce with this client.
And again, therefore, he’s able to have a better quality of life, participate in activities in the community. He doesn’t need to worry about anymore, is a nurse showing up that has the right qualifications and has the right experience because again, that is exactly what we are providing here at Intensive Care at Home.
And even on the very rare occasion where we have, maybe someone is calling sick or someone has to cancel shift last minute, which does happen. We still have a pool of ICU nurses that know how to operate a ventilator and know how to operate a tracheostomy, know how to change a tracheostomy in an emergency. And that is definitely a skill that anybody at home on a ventilator with a tracheostomy needs and they need it 24 hours a day, again, as per the “Home Mechanical Ventilation Guidelines.”
So the outcome, again for the quality of life of this particular client has improved dramatically and with a stable team now it’s so much easier for the family as well to trust the nursing team there. And knowing that somebody is coming there every day with an intensive care nursing background, again, that is what is needed for someone with a ventilator and a tracheostomy at home. You can’t water that down. It’s again, like if you’re going into intensive care and you’re sending enrolled nurses or registered nurses without ICU experience, they need to build up that skill.
And with Intensive Care at Home, we can take home patients from ICU predictably because we have the workforce that an intensive care unit has. And therefore, we can move quickly and swiftly, especially now in Australia with the NDIS, with the National Disability Insurance Scheme, that’s funding 24-hour nursing care for ventilation and tracheostomy. And other examples with this particular client is, prior to us starting there, there was a care coordinator through another provider, again, that was not an enrolled nurse, not a registered nurse.
And now that we are having our own care coordinator, that is a very experienced intensive care nurse, we had to look at issues such as tracheostomy changes, which hadn’t been done for months, looking at servicing ventilators, now changing the ventilators because the ventilators are out of date and the ventilators need to be replaced as a matter of urgency because the previous provider just didn’t have the knowledge and the expertise to look into such pertinent issues.
Again, if someone is at home on a ventilator, tracheostomy changes need to happen regularly. Ventilators need to be maintained and serviced. And again, if people like enrolled nurses or registered nurses without ICU experience are managing those programs, simply clients are being left behind because those people and those services simply don’t have the expertise.
And again, Intensive Care at Home is the only service provider in Australia that has third-party accreditation to look after ventilation and tracheostomy at home as part of our Intensive Care at Home third party accreditation.
If you are having a loved one in intensive care or at home, and you want to go home or you want to maintain services at home, you definitely need to look at the quality of services. We know of many clients through other services that again, don’t have the expertise, are not accredited and clients are either going back to hospital all the time.
Or even worse, some clients have passed away at home because nurses that are not ICU trained, can’t manage a medical emergency. So you should definitely be looking for all of those safety aspects when you’re choosing a service provider.
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.