Re: Easy to make ventilators

Posted by Bob on March 28, 2020 at 15:47:44 from (64.255.159.199):

In Reply to: Easy to make ventilators posted by Janicholson on March 28, 2020 at 11:46:34:

Jim, please don't take this as a "negative" to your creativity, but ventilators have a VERY complex and DELICATE job to do.

I don't claim to be an RT, but I've been around "vents" more than I care to remember because of the health issues of a couple of family members.

My late handicapped son was once on a vent for 6 weeks straight, and my wife or I were at his side nearly 24/7 during that time, and during several shorter events.

From what I learned, human lungs are very delicate, they have to be "pumped" by a very exact volume of blended "gas", and there's a lot of sensors/electronics/controls involved on a "vent" that make that happen.

There's a VERY fine balance between getting enough oxygen and CO2 exchange and tearing up the lung tissue, causing more damage and distress and fluid/blood in the lungs and death, and the technicians fine-tune the settings of the electronic controls quite often during the course of treatment.

Here's a quote from a medical site: "Lung injury can be an adverse consequence of mechanical ventilation. This injury is called ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI) and can result in pulmonary edema, barotrauma, and worsening hypoxemia that can prolong mechanical ventilation, lead to multi-system organ dysfunction, and increase mortality. Thus, adopting a ventilator strategy that reduces VILI is an important goal in ventilatory management."

For more reading, GOOGLE "ventilator-induced lung injury".

Here's another thing I wonder about, who's going to set up and monitor all these proposed units AND care for the patient?

From what I have observed, typically every few hours, 24/7, a respiratory tech has to evaluate the patient and thread a LONG suction catheter down through the trach tube and suction mucus and fluids out from deep in the bronchial or lung area, or the patient will "drown". Typically, blood oxygen "sats" will slowly drop as the fluid builds up, then be higher for a while after the suction treatment, 'til the cycle repeats.

No matter how many "vents" are available you still need trained people and lots of them to keep the patients alive.

It's not like connecting a battery maintainer to a battery and going home for the night.

Also, I've read about "pairing" of patients on a "vent". As I understand this, they match 2 people that have similar lung volume, and other factors, then bring in the computer part of the "vent", which identically controls the other "valve box" part of the "vent", each patient has one of those.

Apparently NOT ideal, but has been made to work to some degree.

Any respiratory techs on here that can add to this or correct any errors in what I wrote?

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