ICU sets eyes on vital heart equipment

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“It allows us to monitor patients who are no longer requiring bedrest, where they have access to a bed side monitor, but they can get up start to go to a chair, move around the room and become more mobile and yet, I can still keep my eye on the heart rhythm,” said Skarpinsky.

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According to Skarpinsky, there are currently no working telemetries in the unit, restricting patients to stay in monitored beds.

In the past, they were able to monitor patients’ conditions and reactions to new medications while they were up and about, which shows a truer picture of how they’re really doing compared to when they are laying in bed.

“We can’t do that right now, so patients stay a extra couple of days in the intensive care unit, or they’re admitted to the intensive care unit when they didn’t need to be,” said Skarpinsky. “That’s more pressure on our beds.”

Right now, they only have eight bed monitors. With the fundraiser, they hope to buy seven telemetry units.

“We will then be able to just about double our ability to monitor our patients,” said Skarpinsky, who explained the unit is running at a capacity of at least 85 per cent on any given day.

“So we do have a lot of pressure on our intensive care beds,” she said.

Skarpinsky said as a transition program, they tend to move intensive care patients to general wards before sending them home.

“It is hard to go from an intensive care unit to the home environment with any kind of confidence for patients, so the best step is to go to intensive care to the general ward and then transition to the home environment,” she explained. “We would have the ability to monitor patients via this telemetry by distance.”

“They could be on a bed in the surgical ward, recovery rooms, medical wards, and yet we’re still watching their heart rhythm,” she added.

When we had these specialized units before, patients could move out of the intensive care unit in a timely matter. Transition to the ward, 24 to 48 hours on a portable monitor and physicians and patients felt confident in transitioning to home.

The ICU was short on telemetry units for quite some time, with all of them over 10 years old and parts unavailable for repairs. Since the end of summer, all of them have been completely out of commission, leaving nurses without the efficient equipment.

“(They are) very effective at decreasing nursing workload,” said Skarpinsky. “So when you think of the fact that you have a patient on the telemetry unit and their heart rhythm is being constantly monitored, versus if you don’t have that monitor, how often a staff member needs to take vital signs so blood pressures and heart rates and oxygen saturations—quite often, so that increases the demand on their time as well.”

The seven telemetry units including the software upgrade the ICU would require is expected to cost about $366,000. Antennas will also have to be installed throughout the hospital in order for information to be sent between units.

“That’s the entire cost of it including all the upgrades and the education required for staff to use the new monitors.”

–With files from Khang Nguyen.

asoloducha@panow.com

On Twitter: @alex_soloducha