Why ICU Teams Need Expert ABCDEF Bundle Consulting
In my experience, teaching ICU clinicians about the ABCDEF Bundle can sometimes feel like trying to explain water to a fish. Just as a fish has no context to understand the water it’s swimming in, ICU teams may not always clearly see the preventable harm surrounding them. When clinicians are immersed in the daily realities
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Why Gradual ABCDEF Bundle Implementation Often Results in a Failure to Launch
“Let’s introduce the bundle gradually. We don’t want to overwhelm anyone. Let’s see what the team is willing to do. We can start with awakening and breathing trials, then tackle the rest once we have those down.” This kind of conversation has echoed through medical organizations and clinical leadership teams for years. It’s a logical
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What Clinicians Need to Know About Awakening Trials
I have to admit, I wasn’t a fan of awakening trials at first. During my first two years in an Awake and Walking ICU, we rarely initiated sedation, so the need to turn it off wasn’t a struggle for us. When sedation was necessary, we simply turned it off when we deemed it unnecessary. It
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Reviving Core Nursing Values in Critical Care Through the ABCDEF Bundle
Critical care is an extraordinary and complex specialty that’s continually evolving, with a growing capacity to save and extend life in the face of the most extreme perils. Research, knowledge, and technological developments have transformed nursing skills and our ability to care for patients who are critically ill. Unfortunately, the nursing values and ethics, which
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How Failing to Practice the ABCDEF Bundle Creates Legal Liabilities in the ICU
As a nurse and a nurse advocate, I am passionate about protecting nurses and all ICU clinicians from falling victim to legal liabilities in the ICU. The alarming reality is that when hospitals fail to train and support their teams in keeping patients as awake and mobile as possible, everyone from hospital administrators to bedside
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Prehab vs. Rehab: Which Approach Should be Prioritized in the ICU?
For the past five years, I have been engrossed in exploring the history and current culture of the ICU, as they relate to the ABCDEF Bundle. As a result, I’ve been faced with having to compare my ingrained understanding of early mobility to the cultural “norms” I see at the bedside, as well as in
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Why ICU Culture Is a Barrier to Early Mobility
While it’s clear that the ABCDEF Bundle saves lives and helps to restore the quality of life for ICU survivors, many intensive care units continue to standardize deep sedation and immobility. But why is this? Why does one ICU use sedation on less than 20% of intubated patients, while another sedates 100% of these patients
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Health care inequality in critical care medicine is multifactorial and negatively impacts patient outcomes [18]. During COVID-19, for instance, it was noted that Hispanic patients were more at risk of having severe COVID-19 infections, and despite their younger age, they had a higher mortality rate. Socioeconomic disparities, lack of access to health care, timing, and
How the ABCDEF Bundle Can Help Mitigate RN Burnout
Nurses enter critical care medicine to alleviate human suffering, support patients in their most vulnerable moments, be patient advocates, do no harm, and save lives. But being a critical care nurse is physically, emotionally, and mentally challenging. Many factors have resulted in the loss of thousands of expert nurses, creating the staffing crisis we’re currently
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How ICU Staffing Ratios Relate to the Awake and Walking ICU Approach
The Awake and Walking ICU approach is deeply rooted in science, pathophysiology, and logic. Yet some of the best fruits of this method are humanity, compassion, dignity, and love. We use this approach to humanize the ICU, and I believe that is a desire of most ICU clinicians. But the reality is, no matter how
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I stumbled upon Kali’s podcast midway through my anesthesia critical care fellowship in February 2021. At our institution, I got the impression that patients in the ICU either got better on their own or had a prolonged and complicated course to LTAC or death. In her podcast, Kali explained that LTAC was rarely the outcome for patients in the Awake and Walking ICU in Salt Lake City.
Their ICU survivors hardly ever got trached, PEGed, or sent to LTAC, and literally walked out of the hospital in condition as close to their previous health as they could be. Although the concept of using no sedation on ventilated patients was completely foreign to me, it made sense based on what I had read in the literature. I devoured all of the episodes from the beginning, many of them bringing tears and regret for my ignorance, followed by inspiration and hope in later episodes. Listening to her podcast has been one of the most profound experiences in my short, eight-year career in medicine.
After discovering the no sedation, early mobility practice at the Awake and Walking ICU, my focus shifted to bringing it to my own institution. I visited Salt Lake City in March to witness it with my own eyes. Since then, I’ve been in touch closely with Kali and Louise to learn the practical approaches to sedation wean and sedation avoidance for newly intubated patients in the ICU.
Mikita Fuchita, MD
Colorado, USA
Perception Versus Reality: Debunking The Myths About Medically-Induced Comas
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