Highlights
- •Critical care transport of prone acute respiratory distress syndrome patients is a feasible and cost-effective intervention that will help prevent treatment delays and interruptions.
- •A nonphysician critical care transport team (registered nurse and paramedic) can initiate prone positioning before transport.
Abstract
We report the case of a non-physician based critical care transport team (registered
nurse and paramedic) that successfully initiated prone positioning of a severe acute
respiratory distress patient prior to transport to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation
capable teaching hospital.
With the increasing use of advanced treatments such as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation,
prone positioning, and continuous renal replacement therapy for severe acute respiratory
distress syndrome (ARDS), the necessity to transport these patients to specialized
hospitals will correspondingly increase. Emergency Health Services Life Flight, the
primary critical care transport program in Eastern Canada, developed a prone position
protocol to meet this clinical need. Since the implementation of the protocol, we
have successfully initiated prone positioning of 2 patients with ARDS before transport
to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation– and continuous renal replacement therapy–capable
teaching hospital. This represents the first report of a nonphysician (registered
nurse and paramedic) critical care team initiating prone positioning before transport.
Consent for publication was only obtained in the second case, which we present here.
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Article Info
Publication History
Published online: March 12, 2018
Identification
Copyright
© 2018 Air Medical Journal Associates. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
