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

So, one of our members, as part of our membership for families in intensive care at intensivecaresupport.org, has her 28-year-old husband in ICU after a stab wound to the liver. Now, after he was admitted to ICU, he ended up in cardiac arrest and he ended up with hypoxic brain injury . And now the ICU team is putting pressure on her and her family to withdraw life support only after a couple of days in ICU.

She then had a family meeting lined up where we advised only to go if she had a written agenda that the hospital would give her. Only then do we advise to go into a family meeting after the family has received a written agenda. We do not advise to go into any family meetings without a written agenda because you got to prepare yourself for it. It’s often life or death, and if you’re not prepared you may not get the outcome that you want. Most likely, you won’t get the outcome that you want if you’re not prepared and if you don’t have an advocate like ourselves there. And we can be present in family meetings over the phone, or if you’re in Melbourne here in Australia, we can also be there in person.

Now, let me read out this email from our member and our client after we set her up with questions for the family meeting. So, remember, this is in the context, 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 questions to ask. They don’t know what to look for. They don’t know their rights and they don’t know how to manage doctors and nurses in intensive care.

So let me read out this email. So, remember we set her up with the questions for the family meeting and she says, “Wow. All of the questions you asked me, I have not been provided with any details about any of this from the ICU team. This honestly made me start crying because I’m realizing that they’re keeping so much under wraps and hidden from not only me, but his family as well, that I don’t have any answers to your questions yet, but I will find out. I will get all this information to your questions as soon as I return to the hospital in the morning. I can’t believe I never thought to ask these questions.” Remember families in intensive care don’t know what they don’t know. “And even more so that they purposely didn’t provide all of that vital information, given that it’s in the best interest of my husband’s health, well-being, and overall knowledge that can help me understand and know that they are doing everything possible to ensure that he makes somewhat full recovery. As I mentioned, I’m extremely upset at this very moment considering I have no answers to any of your questions, but I will, once I get back to the ICU.”

So, if you watched any of my videos or read my blog for any length of time, you’ve heard me say over and over again, ICU teams are only telling you half of the story. It is like learning a secret language. If you don’t know what questions to ask, you won’t get to the bottom of it. And it’s incredibly important that you almost do like a “crash course” in ICU. So that the intensive care team knows you have someone on your side, you have an advocate and a consultant that can help you steer this extremely difficult territory in those life-or-death situations.

You need to know what questions to ask in life-or-death situations because if you don’t, the outcomes will not be as good as you would want them to be. And we have turned many situations around. You just need to look at our testimonials and our case studies. We have turned many situations around in favor of patients and their families simply by asking the questions because we understand intensive care inside out. And we can talk to the intensive care team on a clinical level, or we can set you up with questions so that you know and understand what’s really going on and what they’re not telling you, and how it impacts on your loved one’s life.

That’s my quick tip for today.

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

Also, have a look at our membership for families in intensive care at intensivecaresupport.org.

We also offer medical record reviews for patients in intensive care or after intensive care if you suspect medical negligence, for example.

Also, share this video with your friends and families, give it a thumbs up, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families in intensive care, comment below what you want to see next or what questions and insights you have and click the notification bell.

Thanks for watching.

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