With the COVID-19 pandemic, non-critical care providers are being asked to assist the critical care community in caring for COVID-19 patients. Although many healthcare systems have been able to handle the burden and ensure the “ideal” care of patients solely by critical care specialists, some systems have been overwhelmed and an “all hands on deck” approach has been necessary.

For some providers, this is new territory. For others, it is brushing off the dust/rust of ventilator management.

Numerous guidelines from the Society of Critical Care Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, and others have been produced to help. Outstanding podcasts like those from Life in the Fast Lane, EMCrit, and Hippo Education have provided frontline providers with critical information.

For the basics for those with little or less recent ICU experience, I recommend the above sources, as well as excellent texts such as the outstanding “The ICU Book” by Dr. Paul Marino. We have previously evaluated several critical care apps that discussed ventilators. We liked the recently reviewed Critical Care Compendium, and ICU Notes, but weren’t big fans of Basics of Mechanical Ventilation. We also favorably reviewed the iOS The Ventilator App by Dr. William Owens and Creative App Solutions.

What about the basics of the actual ventilators? The National Strategic Stockpile contains three ventilators, including the LP10 (Medtronics), the LTV1200 (Vyaire), and the Uni-vent Eagle 754 (Impact Instrumentation). These may not be familiar to you or your critical care nurses, respiratory therapists, or primary care providers now helping in the COVID ICU. A new app called the Ventilator Training Alliance (VTA) has teamed up with ventilator manufacturers around the world to provide the basics for each of the ventilators each company currently produces.

Likes

• Contains hundreds of materials from training videos to manuals to presentations on ventilators from nine manufacturers

• Can download materials for offline use

• Available for Android

Dislikes

• Could benefit from more basic information on vent modes; settings not specific to any manufacturer

• Folder structure under each manufacturer could be easier to navigate/find what you need

• Does not have information for all of the ventilator models in the Strategic National Stockpile (missing the LP10 (Medtronics) and the Uni-vent Eagle 754 (Impact Instrumentation)

This post appeared on iMedicalApps.com.