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How Often Should the ICU Team Give You Information? Quick Tip for Families in Intensive Care!

 

Hi, it’s Patrik Hutzel from intensivecarehotline.com with another quick tip for families in intensive care.

So yesterday, I was in a family meeting with a client and the intensive care team. Cutting a long story short, our client’s family member has been in intensive care for a couple of weeks after a brain tumor resection. He’s not waking up or not to the degree yet where he can be extubated. He’s on a ventilator with a breathing tube and the ICU team is wanting to do a tracheostomy, and it looks like a tracheostomy can’t be avoided in this situation cause he’s simply not awake enough. But here is something else that I want to highlight today, is that this was the first meeting after two weeks in ICU.

So basically, the ICU team has been sharing very minimal information with the family because they’ve been avoiding them, quite frankly, and they’ve been given minimal information. They have then been told in the family meeting, or they should only be calling once a day. They shouldn’t be asking too many questions because they are too busy and apparently, the family has been asking for access to medical records, which they couldn’t get.

So, the first thing that we sorted out in the family meeting is making sure they get access to the medical records. But it just goes to show some ICUs are really not that great. And if I was to give them a rating from a scale from 0 to 10, zero meaning really low and ten meaning the best, I would give them a rating of maybe three or a four. And when they were sharing information with the family, they were very short and abrupt, not really giving them all the details. And you could hear they were getting really frustrated with us asking all the clinical questions that are important for someone in intensive care, and they were really not wanting to share much information. They were just trying to push their agenda, which is a tracheostomy and a PEG (percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy) tube.

But anyway, here is the moral of the story. If you are encountering a situation like that where ICU doesn’t want to talk to you, keeping the information very brief, keeping their information very close to their chest, it makes you wonder, what do they have to hide? So, your next step then is to keep asking questions, to keep them on their toes, but more importantly, you need to get access to the medical records as quickly as possible so you can verify information independently. So, you’re not really holding hostage to what the ICU team thinks is appropriate.

How often they should be answering your questions? Well, they should be answering your questions, 24 hours a day. What is it they have to hide? They should not wait two weeks to sit down with you and explain things to you. For example, the meeting took place after about two weeks because now they wanted to push a tracheostomy. Well, they should have tried harder in those two weeks to get their family member off the ventilator and there was no information given what they tried, what they didn’t try. We found out more in the meeting by obviously asking the right questions.

But it all comes down to again, once again, that the biggest challenge for families in intensive care is simply that they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what to look for. They don’t know what questions to ask. They don’t know their rights, and they don’t know how to manage doctors and nurses in intensive care. And this is exactly what we are doing in this situation, managing them so that the family can have peace of mind control, power, influence, and can make informed decisions.

So, that is my quick tip for today.

If you have a loved one in intensive care and you need help, go to intensivecarehotline.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website, or simply send us an email to [email protected].

Also, have a look at our membership site for families in intensive care at intensivecaresupport.org. There, you have access to me and my team, 24 hours a day, and we answer all things intensive care related.

Also, if you need a medical record review, you should contact us as well. We can review medical records for your loved one in ICU, but also after ICU. Especially if you have unanswered questions, if you’re suspecting medical negligence, we can shed light on all of that by reviewing the medical records. But we strongly suggest that you get access to medical records day one to avoid a situation like I’ve just explained to you in this quick tip.

Now, subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families in intensive care, share the video with your friends and families, click the like button, click the notification bell, and comment below what you want to see next, what questions and insights you have from this video.

Thanks for watching.

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