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Quick Tip for Families in Intensive Care: When Does Your Loved One Need an Arterial Line?

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

Currently I’m working with the client has had their mother in intensive care for over three weeks now. Their mother has been ventilated and on and off inotropes or vasopressors like noradrenaline and norepinephrine or adrenaline and epinephrine for the last three weeks.

Now it turns out that their mother never had an arterial line. Now an arterial line is imperative for mechanical ventilation as well as when patients are on inotropes or vasopressors.

Now it turns out that this Intensive Care Unit in particular has never followed best practice and it’s simply dangerous for any patient not having an arterial line when they are ventilated and are on inotropes or vasopressors.

So what’s my tip here and what’s the lesson? The tip really is you need to question everything and you simply don’t know what you don’t know unless the client would have spoken to me. They would have never found out that the ICU is not really following this practice. So by not knowing what you don’t know. It’s really dangerous for you and your family member.

So how can you go about learning more about intensive care? Well, check out our website intensivecarehotline.com, where you can read our case studies where you can really have a crash course about intensive care and the shortcut, of course, is to give us a call on one of the numbers on the top of our website intensivecarehotline.com.

Or simply send us an email to [email protected].

Take care, and I’ll talk to you in a few days.