The Ventilator Management Team: Repurposing Anesthesia Workstations and Personnel to Combat COVID-19.
Robert J CanelliNicole SpenceNisha KumarGerardo RodriguezMauricio GonzalezPublished in: Journal of intensive care medicine (2020)
The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic resulted in unprecedented numbers of patients with respiratory failure requiring ventilatory support. The number of patients who required critical care quickly outpaced the availability of intensive care unit (ICU) beds. Consequently, health care systems had to creatively expand critical care services into alternative hospital locations with repurposed staff and equipment. Deploying anesthesia workstations to the ICU to serve as mechanical ventilators requires equipment preparation, multidisciplinary planning, and targeted education. We aim to contextualize this process, highlighting major differences between anesthesia workstations and ICU ventilators, and to share the insights gained from our experiences creating an anesthesia provider-based ventilator management team.
Keyphrases
- mechanical ventilation
- coronavirus disease
- intensive care unit
- respiratory failure
- healthcare
- acute respiratory distress syndrome
- sars cov
- quality improvement
- palliative care
- extracorporeal membrane oxygenation
- primary care
- mental health
- respiratory syndrome coronavirus
- cancer therapy
- emergency department
- mass spectrometry
- health insurance
- long term care
- adverse drug
- liquid chromatography