This is good, and I'm glad they're doing it.
They've clearly got involvement with existing ventilator manufacturers.
Are they talking to doctors in ITUs? Here's a recent Facebook thread from people involved in London's new hospital: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=103930280957826&st...
It shows that ventilation of covid-19 patients is not like ventilation of other patients.
I'll paste part of it here because I know some can't visit Facebook.
It's by Daniel Martin OBE, Macintosh Professor of Anaesthesia, Intensive Care Lead for High Consequence Infectious Diseases.
---everything below this point is a direct quote from Daniel Martin---
Ventilation
- Early high PEEP is probably not the right strategy and may be harmful. This is not ARDS in the early phase of the illness.
- Avoid spontaneous ventilation early in ICU admission as also may be harmful.
- There is clear microvascular thrombosis happening in the pulmonary circulation, which leads to an increased dead space.
- Also some evidence of early pulmonary fibrosis reported from Italy, possibly oxygen related, possibly inflammation related.
- Not many patients have reached extubation yet in London, re-intubation seems to be common. I highlighted our experiences of airway swelling / stridor / reintubation.
- Brompton are seeing wedge infarcts in the lungs on imaging, along with pulmonary thrombosis without DVT.
- Proning is essential and should be done early. Don’t just do it once. Threshold for many centres is a PF ratio of 13, but all agreed, do it even earlier.
- Early on in the disease, the benefit of proning lasts - Many centres using inhaled nitric oxide and prostacyclin with good effect. Tachyphylaxis with NO after 4-5 days.
- Generally people are using humidified circuits with HMEs.
- A very interesting thing they are doing at Georges is cohorting by phase of disease i.e. early, late, extubation / trachy. It involves more moving of patients but helps each team to focus on things more easily.
- Leak test before extubation is crucial, others are also seeing airway swelling.
- Wait longer than usual before extubating, high reintubation rates reported. Do not extubatne if inflam markers still high.
My conclusions from this are:
- Less aggressive PEEP strategy at the beginning of the disease and go straight for proning.
- Thromboembolic disease is prevalent, look for it. No one is sure about whether we should anti-coagulate everyone, this is probably too risky.
- An extubation protocol is needed immediately.
- We should consider using inhaled prostacyclin again (like we previously did) as it seems to be working early in the disease.