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

So, I was talking to a client this morning and the client told me that, their 85-year-old mother is in intensive care after cardiac arrest. She’s been there for seven days now. And just after a couple of days, the ICU team did a tracheostomy, which from my perspective and from my experience, after having worked in intensive care for over 20 years in three different countries, where I have also worked as a nurse unit manager for over five years in intensive care. It’s very premature to place someone on a tracheostomy just after a couple of days and telling the family that, “Oh, this lady will never come off the ventilator“. They haven’t even tried yet. And given that this particular client is in the U.S. they are trying to prepare this lady to go into Long Term Acute Care (LTAC).  LTAC is not even the better version of a nursing home.

So, rather than giving her the best care and treatment in intensive care after cardiac arrest, with a breathing tube, with a nasogastric tube, with trying to optimize cardiac function, trying to optimize electrolytes, and giving cardiac treatment, they’re already riding her off and saying, “Well, she will never come off the ventilator. Let’s do a tracheostomy, let’s do a Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy tube (PEG) and send her into LTAC.”

Now, this lady is also asking whether home care is an option. And whilst home care is an option with Intensive Care at Home, it’s way too early to look at home care. It’s only been seven days, and the goal for any ICU is to get this lady off the ventilator.

Now, bear in mind, the overwhelming majority of intensive care patients get off the ventilator. So why should this lady not get off the ventilator? Why would they do a tracheostomy prematurely? And I can tell you why they’ve done that. It’s only to prepare her to send her out to LTAC as quickly as possible. It’s for the ICU. It’s out of sight, out of mind.

So, it just goes to show that once again, if you’re not doing your research from day one, you will make wrong decisions. You can’t make an informed decision. The ICU team sounds to me like has almost coerced this lady to place a tracheostomy on her mom, to place a PEG tube on her mom. Again, it goes to show that families in intensive care 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 lady needs to start managing the ICU team, not the other way around. And that’s where we can help with very, very quickly. This lady, has no idea what the best treatment options are for her mom, and she needs that crucial second opinion very, very quickly. And to verify what I’m saying here that we can provide a second opinion, I’ll post a video below with a testimonial of a client that was in ICU about 18 months ago where we helped them to save their loved one’s life irrespective of the ICU wanting to withdraw treatment and saying that treatment would be futile. Well, I had this gentleman on the podcast, verifying that he was destined to die according to the ICU, but when we intervened, he was now on a podcast and he’s living his life.

So, it just goes to show that, if you’re not doing your own research, you could potentially lose your loved one. So go and check out that podcast as well.

So 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 simply send us an email to [email protected] with your questions.

Also, have a look at our membership for families in intensive care at intensivecaresupport.org. There you have access to me and my team 24 hours a day in a membership area and via email. And we answer all questions, intensive care and Intensive Care at Home related.

Also, if you need a medical record review, please contact us for a medical record review. We review medical records in real time in ICU, and we can give you a second opinion in real time. But we also review medical records after intensive care.

If you have unanswered questions, if you need closure, or if you simply think there’s been medical negligence, we can help you with all of that.

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

Thanks for watching.

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

Take care.