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

So today, I was talking to a client who has their two-and-a-half-year-old baby in ICU after a heart transplant that happened two and a half months ago. Everything seemed to work well for the first month, and then the baby ended up in lung failure and had to be placed on ECMO for lung failure. And the intensive care team is telling this young mother that they don’t know what’s wrong with the lungs. And I said, “Look, that’s very unusual.” She said that the chest x-ray is completely white, which suggests there might be ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome). But I said to her, “We can’t really help her without looking at medical records and it would all be documented in medical records.”

And again, this is another sign why, you as a family, you always need to ask for access to medical records as quickly as possible so you can stop speculating because there’s a lot of speculation without looking at the medical records. All the answers will be there. So, we can really only help families and they can help themselves by looking at medical records, because it should all be documented there.

So, my tip again is that you, as a family, need to get access to the medical records, really day one, so that there’s no secrecy, that there’s full transparency in the treatment process. And especially when it comes to children, emotions are even higher, and you don’t want to walk in the dark. You want answers as quickly as possible.

So, my advice to this lady was to get access to the medical records and then we can help her from there. We can also talk to doctors directly and ask questions. We have a series of questions to ask when it comes to ECMO, but we have a series of questions to ask for any intensive care patient.

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.

That’s once again, exactly what we are dealing with here that this young lady doesn’t know what to look for, doesn’t even know what questions to ask, and it’s rather simple. Get access to the medical records so that there’s nothing to hide, full transparency, and go from there because the other thing that this lady said is the ICU team is telling her that they should stop ECMO because treatment for her two-and-a-half-year-old son might be “futile” and this family is by no means ready to give up, and they want to try everything that’s possible for their two-and-a-half-year-old baby boy.

So, that is my quick tip for today.

Stop speculating. We are not in the business of speculating. We are in the business of evaluating medical evidence, and that’s in medical records, or by talking to health professionals directly.

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, and we answer all questions intensive care related there.

Also, if you need a medical record review, please contact us as well. We review medical records in ICU, in pediatric ICU in real time, and we also review medical records after intensive care, especially if you are suspecting medical negligence or if you simply need closure and get questions answered. In this day and age, you should get access to medical records online. Most hospitals have electronic medical records nowadays. They should be able to just send you a link to a website with a username and a password, and you should have access to the medical records, assuming you are the power of attorney or next of kin.

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, or 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.