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

So my quick tip today is that you need to question everything. You need to question everything when you have a loved one in intensive care.

So here is a case study again, where we’re working with a client who has their 72-year old mother in intensive care with ARDS after COVID-19. And the client has been in an induced coma, has been proned on and off, and is now at the stage where the ICU team is suggesting a tracheostomy.

Now, the client only came to us a couple of days ago when they first even heard about a tracheostomy, they had no idea what a tracheostomy is or was, what the purpose of it is. And now they are coming to us and they’re asking, “Is a tracheostomy the right next step?”

So then we set up a call with the doctors and the nurses, and it turns out that, the intensive care team hasn’t even tried to wake up our client’s mother. So why is this important? Now, for anybody that needs to have a tracheostomy in intensive care, the first step is to try and wake them up and see whether they can wake up and they can breathe.

Now their oxygen levels are around 60% of oxygen which is fairly high. The PEEP level is set at 14 which is fairly high, but the intensive care team is saying they can reduce that over the next few days, and then they can do a tracheostomy. But the question that you need to ask yourself as a family is, has the intensive care team done everything they can beyond the shadow of a doubt to get your loved one off the ventilator? Because if they haven’t, you’re on the right track.

I’m constantly surprised and really gobsmacked that families in intensive care trust blindly. Their loved one’s life is in the hand of the intensive care team and yet they trust blindly. You can’t trust blindly. You need to question everything from day one. You need to do your research and you need to make sure that your loved one is getting the best care and treatment.

The reality is this, tracheostomies have their time and their place. But the reality also is that especially for our viewers in the United States, once your loved one has a tracheostomy, the intensive care team wants to send your loved one off to LTAC as quickly as possible. And LTAC areas or LTAC facilities are just a disaster and often kill patients. So if you don’t do your research, you’re literally at risk of not getting good outcomes for your loved one. You’re risking that your loved one is potentially dying.

So coming back to our client where the family’s asking, should they give consent to a tracheostomy or not? Now we’re still in the middle of looking at all the details. For example, what are arterial blood gases like? What are chest x-rays showing? What medications is their loved one on? Have they changed sedation? What have they done to try and wake the patient up and get out of the induced coma? Because once somebody is waking up from an induced coma and can potentially breathe and obey commands, that’s when you can take the breathing tube out and avoid a tracheostomy. And that’s what you should be aiming for.

Now, that is my quick tip for today.

If you have a loved one in intensive care, you will need help. It’s such a highly complex area. If you believe you can manage that territory by yourself, you are literally faced with life or death for your loved one. And if you’re not asking the right questions, if you don’t have someone by your side that understands intensive care inside out, it takes years if not decades of training and experience to understand intensive care inside out, how do you think you can manage that highly complex life or death territory without help?

Go to intensivecarehotline.com. Call me on one of the numbers on the top of the website, or send me an email to [email protected].

Like this video, comment below what you want to see next, or what insights you have from this video, and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

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