For Patients & Customers

The ICU Respiratory Therapy Core Team is a specialized group of therapists that work specifically in this area. These therapists are Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) certified.

Aspects of ICU Respiratory Therapy include all general treatments and modalities as well as the following:

1. Mechanical Ventilator Management:

• Initiation, monitoring, weaning, and discontinuation
• Assist with transportation of the critically ill mechanically ventilated patient for treatments/diagnostic procedures that cannot be performed at the patient’s bedside

2. Hemodynamic monitoring:

• Assist with insertion of arterial lines, central lines, and Swan-Ganz catheters
• Transduce pressures from any invasive catheter
• Perform thermodilution cardiac outputs and monitor continuous cardiac output trends ScVO2 (Central Venous) oximetry
• Obtain oxygenation profile

3. Airway Management:

• Assist physician with intubation and suctioning
• Perform and/or assist nurses with extubation

4. Capnography:

• Monitoring end-tidal CO2 for intubated as well as non-intubated patients

5. Diagnostics:

• The RT staff will draw, analyze, and report all blood gases. We also assist in drawing labs from indwelling catheters and/or puncture sites.

6. ICU Respiratory Therapy Protocols:

• Ventilator Weaning Protocol for Post-Operative Cardiac Surgery
• Mechanical Ventilation Albuterol Protocol
• Long-Term Ventilator Weaning Protocol

7. Rapid Response Team Member:

• The ICU RT is a member of the multidisciplinary critical care team that responds to all Rapid Response Team (RRT) calls within the Medical Center.