ICU nurse practitioner / host of 2 podcasts/ ICU consultant / mom
I am an ICU nurse practitioner on a mission to overhaul how the critical care community cares for patients on ventilators. I come from an ICU that allows almost all patients to be awake and walking with a breathing tube and ventilator. As a travel nurse I was shocked to find that the rest of the ICU community has a culture of automatically placing all patients into medically induced comas. While getting my doctorate, I dove into the research and was amazed to find that we have decades of sound research demonstrating the lethal and long-altering affects of medically-induced comas and yet very few clinicians know the research nor try to avoid sedation. I train ICU teams to become Awake and Walking ICUs and give families the information and tools to advocate for their loved ones.