This blog post was first published at our sister site http://intensivecareathome.com.au a specialised home care nursing service, providing Quality of Life and/or Quality of end of life for long-term mechanically ventilated Adults& Children with Tracheostomy and their Families, as a genuine alternative to a long term stay in Intensive Care.

In last week’s blog I was talking about “What an extension of Intensive Care looks like in the real world”. If you haven’t read it you can read it further below in our blog section. In this week’s blog I want to highlight and focus on how INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME can help Hospitals and Intensive Care Units in particular, to free up beds and staff, which are both valuable and expensive resources for any Intensive Care Unit.

By taking a long-term ventilated Adult or Child with Tracheostomy out of Intensive Care into their own home, your organisation wins on both ends. You would be having an empty bed that can be allocated and used for a more acutely unwell Patient and you would also be having staff available to accommodate a new and acutely unwell Patient.

Your organisation would most likely also save to book an expensive agency staff member or book overtime or a casual staff member to accommodate that new admission. And if you think about your staff satisfaction, your nursing and your medical staff most likely also prefer to look after a new admission, rather than after the “day 60 Trachy” on a ventilator that isn’t going anywhere soon. You can leave that to the specialists such as INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME and you can worry and focus about what you do best which is acute Intensive Care, just like we can then focus on what we do best which Intensive Care At Home.

What INTENSIVE CARE AT HOME can also do is to accommodate short term and temporary respite for your long term ventilated Adults& children with Tracheostomy by taking them home for up to two weeks or for however long you deem to be an appropriate time frame, before returning the Patient back to Hospital. Chances are that if your Patient is long-term ventilated and a difficult and slow respiratory wean that by taking the Patient out of the Intensive Care Unit into their own home that they will blossom by being at home and you have an empty bed, staff and it will cost less than an ICU bed.

I was giving a talk a couple of weeks ago at the ACPEL(Advanced Care Planning and End-of-Life care) conference in Melbourne and a couple of Intensivists asked me about doing short term and temporary respite for some of their long-term Patients as they felt that this would speed up their recovery process as they also thought that the difficulty in weaning somebody off the ventilator is partly a psychological issue, which is often related to the Intensive Care environment and the lack of Quality of Life in ICU. What are your thoughts and what would you like to see in Intensive Home Care nursing services doing for your Patients and for your hospital? For more information check out http://intensivecareathome.com.au Send us your comments to [email protected] or [email protected]

Sincerely, your friend
Patrik Hutzel