Features
Life Savers
Success stories aren't easy to come by in the home ventilator field, but Cynthia Gray has many — and the number is growing. The vice president of respiratory clinical services for Canadian Valley Medical Solutions in Oklahoma City is part of a team that has literally been a lifesaver for children and adults on home ventilators.
Gray, together with James Royall, M.D., a pediatric pulmonologist with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center Children's Hospital; Yolanda Sellers, a registered respiratory therapist; and Julia Vanna, a nurse practitioner, started a program three years ago that teaches caregivers how to deal with patients on ventilators and the equipment itself. The results have been dramatic.
Canadian Valley serves 25 patients on home ventilators, many of them children. Five of the young patients have been completely weaned off the ventilators, and Sellers notes that about half are off their ventilators during the day for at least a couple of hours. Children whose prognosis was grave have sometimes progressed to the point where they are running around a ballpark and going to school.
“It's incredible,” Gray says.
It's certainly a far cry from the days when patients on ventilators usually didn't even go home or, if they did, had no hope of ever getting off the machine.
“I remember when kids went home on ventilators and just stayed there. They never went out, they never got off [the ventilators],” Gray says. “We have mothers who take their children to the park on ventilators and to Wal-Mart. They know what to take, what to do. It's given them a life.”
To make the program work, Royall explains, “we had to partner with an agency that had the experience [of working with ventilator patients].” He found that in Canadian Valley, where Gray's experience in dealing with patients on ventilators was enhanced by another factor: her belief that educating caregivers ultimately helps the patient, cuts back on emergency room visits, pares costs of caring for ventilator patients, improves profits and generates positive outcomes.
