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

Many families in intensive care come to us and they want to know what is a medically induced coma? So let me answer this for you. A medically induced coma, especially in intensive care is a coma that’s induced by sedatives and opiates. Why is your loved one induced into a coma? Well, the most important reason why your loved one is induced into a medically induced coma in intensive care is mechanical ventilation and the breathing tube or endotracheal tube that is basically sitting in your loved one’s throat and it’s going down the lungs and that is very, very painful, very, very uncomfortable.

Now what leads to mechanical ventilation and the breathing tube or endotracheal tube? Well, many conditions can lead to that. In intensive care, the most common reasons are trauma, head injuries, open heart surgery and other forms of surgery where mechanical ventilation and the breathing tube needs to be commenced to save someone’s life, quite literally.

So mechanical ventilation and a breathing tube is often started or sometimes started outside of intensive care. For example, in emergency departments/emergency room, sometimes even out in the community where people might get resuscitated and they get attached to a ventilator because they can’t breathe and then they get induced into a coma there.

Also sometimes, some medically induced coma get started in theater when people have surgery. So when people get induced into a coma, into a medically induced coma, again, there are several conditions leading to that and you can find out those conditions when you look on our website at intensivecarehotline.com at the section on the top of the website,”intensive care insights”, you can see all the reasons why people need to get induced into a coma or the conditions where people need to get induced into a medically induced coma.

So when people get induced into a coma, they often need, at a bare minimum, a peripheral line. They need some intravenous access. But in intensive care, it’s often a central line or a CVC line where people can get sedation, opiates, and often also inotropes or vasopressors to stabilize them.

So that’s my tip for today. Check out intensivecarehotline.com. We have hundreds of case studies there where we help families of critically ill patients in intensive care and if you have a question, just email me to [email protected] or if you want to talk to me, just call on one of the numbers on the top of the website.

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