Patient tolerance and comfort are greatly enhanced due to the high-flow nasal cannula oxygen system’s ability to heat and humidify. A recent study in RESPIRATORY CARE in 2020, showcased that utilizing NHF Therapy kept more than half of the participating subjects out of the ICU and indicated that patients with acute hypoxic respiratory failure can safely receive NHF Therapy with successful outcomes.
UnityPoint Health keeps 73% of COVID-19 patients off ventilation using NHF therapy UnityPoint Health found that Covid-19 patients on ventilators stayed in the ICU between eight and 14 days and took much longer to recover and breathe on their own. However, when the hospital administered NHF Therapy, the ICU stay averaged only three days.
By utilizing NHF Therapy for its Covid-19 patients, the medical staff successfully kept 73 percent of the patients off invasive ventilation.
Temple University Hospital prevents COVID-19 patients from being admitted to the ICU Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia was inundated with nearly 500 Covid-19 patients in need of possible ventilation in March 2020. Given the high risk of mortality associated with Covid-19 patients and ventilation, the doctors looked for alternative therapies. Of the 500, approximately 104 patients were given NHF Therapy from March 10 to April 24 with positive results. The NHF Therapy prevented the need to intubate 67 of 104 patients (64.42 percent).
In addition, healthcare workers remained safe and unharmed – not one person developed the Covid-19 virus.
Not every COVID-19 patient requires ventilation or the ICU There is no question that a possible ventilator shortage along with reduced ICU capacity can be a distressing outcome of this fast-spreading disease, but here are some facts that may put these statistics in perspective: not every Covid-19 patient requires the ICU and not every patient needs to be escalated to ventilation. In fact, according to the Center for Disease Control or CDC, approximately 20-30 percent of Covid-19 patients require hospitalization and a smaller number of those patients, 5 to 10 percent, necessitate the level of treatment that would require a stay in the ICU.
With the next, and perhaps most severe, wave of the outbreak upon us, now is the time for the medical community to look at all its options for severely ill Covid-19 patients. Both Temple University and UnityPoint were able to reap numerous positive results when administering NHF Therapy, proving the concept in an earlier wave of the outbreak.
