SHAWNA STRICKLAND: Welcome to this course on mechanical ventilation.
I'm Dr. Shawna Strickland, and I'm a registered respiratory therapist
and associate executive director at the American
Association for Respiratory Care.
The goal of this course is to provide an overview of mechanical ventilation
and the patient ventilator interaction for non-critical care clinicians.
In non-pandemic times, the respiratory therapist, critical care physician,
and ICU nurse work in tandem to meet the ventilatory needs of the patient.
However, in pandemic times, the surge of critically ill patients
may overwhelm the number of trained critical care clinicians.
In that case, the critical care team is augmented
by non-critical care clinicians.
The staffing model that we're talking about
is not part of our normal, everyday routine.
As we can see on the screen, the Society for Critical Care Medicine
allows for a staffing model that provides a single critical care
physician to oversee a great number of patients.
Again, the critical care team is augmented by an expanded
team of non-critical care clinicians.
All health care providers are vital to ensuring that the patient's
ventilatory needs are met.
In this course, our focus is on the patient
who is unable to oxygenate and ventilate on their own.
We're not going to cure the patient's condition with mechanical ventilation,
but what we are going to do is buy some time for the medical team
to implement proper treatment options to resolve the patient's underlying
condition and provide the patient time to heal until such a time
that they're able to breathe on their own without the mechanical ventilator.
To this end, the basic series of videos in this course
will help the learner understand mechanical ventilation
as a construct, how it interacts with human physiology,
how to assess the patient who is receiving mechanical ventilation,
and how to determine when the patient is ready to breathe on their own
without the mechanical ventilator.
The advanced series of videos in this course
will help the non-ICU physician with identifying
how to set the mechanical ventilator, how
to ventilate patients who have been diagnosed with acute respiratory
distress syndrome, how to ventilate patients with obstructive lung disease,
and how to interpret ventilator wave forms to adjust
the mechanical ventilator settings to improve patient outcomes.
We will also identify how mechanical ventilator strategies
may differ between patients who are COVID-19 positive and those
who are not.
Dr. Susan Wilcox and Mr. Tom Perino will be our guides
through this series of videos.
The videos were also developed in conjunction
with the American Association for Respiratory Care.
Thank you again for joining us for this very important course.