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Quick Tip for Families in Intensive Care: My Dad is in This Horrible LTAC (Long-Term Acute Care), Ventilated & Tracheostomy, Can He be Weaned Off it at Home?

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

Today’s tip is about one of our readers who had her dad in LTAC. And obviously she’s in the U.S. And her dad’s been in LTAC for a couple of months. For those of you that don’t know what LTACS are, LTAC stands for a long-term acute care facility or long-term acute care hospital. Many patients in the U.S. that end up in ICU need a tracheostomy and a ventilator, also then often end up in LTAC.

And you would have heard me saying things about LTAC over the years where we strictly recommend against LTAC because they are not good places to be. No ICU patient on ventilation, tracheostomy, and the PEG (percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy) tube should go to an LTAC. LTACs are not even the better version of a nursing home.

People go from ICU with intensive care doctors, intensive care nurses, respiratory therapists in the U.S. and they’re going to LTAC where you know there’s none of that available. And patients deteriorate very, very quickly, often bounce back into ICU to the detriment of the family. And LTACs are just designed to save money. They’re not designed for clinical care.

ICU is often pitch to families and patients saying, “Oh, LTACs are equipped to wean your family member off the ventilator and the tracheostomy.” And it’s often anything but. We have literally families in LTAC, begging us to help them go back to ICU. But I’ll explain more when I read out this email from our reader, who says.

Hi Patrik,  

Have there been any developments in the U.S. regarding weaning of a ventilator and a trach at home? These LTACs are our worst nightmare places and are hurting my dad so badly. If there is any way to wean off the ventilator at home, we are willing to try.

Well, I can understand that. That you want to look at all options available to you. And as some of you may know, we’re running an organization in Australia, Intensive Care at Home and you can find more information at intensivecareathome.com. We would be able to wean your dad off the ventilator at home if he was in Australia, but in the U.S., as far as our research has shown over the years, there is nothing in the home care space that can help you with weaning patients off the ventilator and the trach at home.

You need accredited health services, unique teams that know what to do 24 hours a day. You need to roll out like, I say, Intensive Care at Home in the home, and then you can start weaning off your dad off the ventilator. But for our audience in the U.S., the biggest takeaway here for you should be, don’t go to LTAC in the first place and there are ways of not going to LTAC. So don’t feel compelled or forced by hospitals telling you, “Oh, your dad needs to go LTAC, that you give in.

We have helped so many families in intensive care, stay in intensive care, with excellent outcomes rather than being pushed to go to LTAC. So rather than contacting us when you are in LTAC, that’s too late. You need to contact us before your dad goes, or your family member is going into LTAC to begin with. And not when it’s too late.

If you’re watching this and you’re in Australia, and I would strongly recommend you contact us at intensivecareathome.com. If you want to have weaning at home or if you have a loved one in intensive care that could be looked after at home with Intensive Care at Home, contact us there.  And that’s also for NDIS support coordinators, if you’re watching this in Australia, contact us.

Coming back to our reader here in the U.S., my advice here is this, if you have now identified that the LTAC are worst nightmare cases, you need to start advocating to get your dad back to ICU. And again, there’s a way to do that, we can help you with that at intensivecarehotline.com where we provide consulting and advocacy for families in intensive care. And I have been doing so for the last 10 years for families in intensive care all around the world. We have proven strategies of getting patients back to ICU, making sure your loved one gets best care and treatment, making sure that you make informed decisions, have peace of mind, control, power, and influence because it sounds to me like you’ve got none of it at the moment and we can help you with that very, very fast.

The other thing that we do is, depending on your dad’s ventilator settings, he might be close to coming off the ventilator. I don’t know, but we would need to know all the details to give you a second opinion, to advise you and also to hold intensive care teams or LTAC teams responsible.

But in an LTAC, you probably won’t have much of a chance because they simply don’t have the skills or the expertise to wean patients off a ventilator. We see it over and over again. When patients go into LTAC, they get a 30-day window often. During that time, they need to be weaned off the ventilator. And if they’re not, then, the care level will be even more downgraded. And they want to send them to a skilled nursing facility, which is even worse. Rather than focusing on weaning patients off the ventilator, they literally wither away in beds in LTAC, and it goes from bad to worse. Very sad, very sad. But something that you can work around and something that we can help you to avoid or remedy.

Now, if you have a loved one in intensive care or in LTAC and you need help, 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, we have a membership for families in intensive care at intensivecarehotline.com. You can click on the membership link there or you can go to intensivecaresupport.org directly and you can get access to the membership where you have access to me and my team 24 hours a day in the membership area and via email and we answer all questions intensive care related.

Also, I offer one on one consulting and advocacy for families in intensive care over the phone, via Skype, via Zoom, via WhatsApp, whichever medium works best for you. I talked to intensive care teams directly holding them accountable and asking all the questions you haven’t even considered asking, but you must ask if you want to make informed decisions, have peace of mind, control, power, and influence.

I also represent you with intensive care teams in family meetings with intensive care teams. But I wouldn’t go into those meetings in the first place without having a written agenda or without having that representation from myself. Otherwise, they will walk all over you. Seen it hundreds of times.

We also offer medical record reviews in real time so that you can get a second opinion in real time and again, so that you are in a position to make informed decisions, have peace of mind, control, power, and influence.

We also provide medical record reviews after intensive care if you have unanswered questions, if you need closure or if you are simply suspecting medical negligence, but we strongly advise you not to wait for that and get help while you are in intensive care because that’s where the rubber hits the road.

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

Thanks for watching.

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

Take care for now.