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Quick Tip for Families in Intensive Care: Going Home from ICU with Tracheostomy & PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy) and My Mom Went Back to ICU Within Less Than 24 Hours! 

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

So we are working with a client currently who has their mother in ICU with a tracheostomy and a PEG (Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy) tube. And ICU was adamant to send this client home without any support and we advised the client to not go home under any circumstances unless she has 24-hour critical care nurses similar to ICU, to make it safe and sustainable for her to go home.

The hospital was adamant to “train the family” and let her mom go home just with her daughter looking after.  We said to the daughter to our client under no circumstances, can you do that?  And your mom is either going to die or she will bounce back into ICU in no time. And unfortunately, we were right. I mean, we’ve been doing this for the better part of 20 years and, we are the experts in this field and especially when it comes to the transition from intensive care to home care, you can’t just send a patient home just by “training”, a family member that’s doomed to fail. It’s a recipe for disaster. And that is exactly what’s happened.

I mean, some of you would be aware, that we are also running a service Intensive Care at Home and you can find more information at the intensivecarehome.com. What we do there is we basically sending critical care nurses into the home and bring the intensive care into the home to make a safe transition from intensive care to a home care environment for long-term intensive care patients, tracheostomy, ventilation, PEG tubes, Home TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition), BiPAP (Bi-level Positive Airway Pressure), CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) ventilation, and so forth. 

So again, 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. And this is obviously what happened here, and it’s a big challenge and the client bounced back to ICU within 24 hours just as we predicted. And it goes to show once again that ICUs don’t necessarily have the best interest of people at heart. They just want patients out without really taking care of them, and that’s where we can help you guide you. If you need Intensive Care at Home, go to intensivecareathome.com and have a look there, and contact us there if you need home care for your loved one in intensive care. But it can’t happen with our 24-hour critical care nurses just as documented on the Mechanical Home Ventilation Guidelines at intensivecareathome.com. 

So that is my quick tip for today.

We have a membership for families of critically ill patients in intensive care at intensivecarehotline.com. You can click on the membership link there and you can join our membership there or you go to intensivecaresupport.org directly. In the membership, 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.

I also offer one on one consulting advocacy for families  in intensive care over the phone, Skype, Zoom WhatsApp, whichever medium works best for you. And I talked to doctors and nurses directly and I asked all the questions that you haven’t even considered asking but must be asked in a situation like that.

I have worked in critical care for over 20 years in three different countries where I also worked as a nurse unit manager for over five years. And I have been consulting and advocating for families in intensive care here at intensivecarehotline.com for the last 10 years.  Have a look at our testimonial section and have a look at our client videos in our podcast section. We have saved lives over the years. I can say that without any exaggeration, I also represent you in family meetings with intensive care teams. So that you don’t get walked all over.

I have a strategy for you when you go into these family meetings, how to position yourself, how to position your loved one, and how to manage the intensive care teams. Most families in intensive care don’t even know that you have the choice to manage intensive care. You just need to make the choice and you need to run with the strategy.

We also offer medical record reviews in real-time so that you can get a second opinion in real time and you can make informed decisions, have peace of mind, control, power and influence. We also offer medical record reviews after intensive care.  If you have unanswered questions, if you need closure or if you are simply suspecting medical negligence and all of this, you get at intensivecarehotline.com. Call us on one of the numbers on the top of our website or send us an email to [email protected]. 

Now, if you like my videos, subscribe to my YouTube channel for regular updates for families in intensive care, click the like button, and click the notification bell. Comment below what you want to see next. What questions and insights you have.

Thank you so much for watching.

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

Take care for now.