Risk Factors for Hospital-Acquired Pressure Injury in Adult Critical Care Patients

Background Accurately measuring the risk of pressure injury remains the most important step for effective prevention and intervention. Relative contributions of risk factors for the incidence of pressure injury in adult critical care patients are not well understood. Objective To develop and validate a model to identify risk factors associated with hospital-acquired pressure injuries among adult critical care patients. Methods This retrospective cohort study included 23 806 adult patients (28 480 encounters) with an intensive care unit stay at an academic quaternary care center. Patient encounters were randomly split (7:3) into training and validation sets. The training set was used to develop a multivariable logistic regression model using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator method. The model’s performance was evaluated with the validation set. Results Independent risk factors identified by logistic regression were length of hospital stay, preexisting diabetes, preexisting renal failure, maximum arterial carbon dioxide pressure, minimum arterial oxygen pressure, hypotension, gastrointestinal bleeding, cellulitis, and minimum Braden Scale score of 14 or less. On validation, the model differentiated between patients with and without pressure injury, with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.85, and performed better than a model with Braden Scale score alone (P < .001). Conclusions A model that identified risk factors for hospital-acquired pressure injury among adult critical care patients was developed and validated using a large data set of clinical variables. This model may aid in selecting high-risk patients for focused interventions to prevent formation of hospital-acquired pressure injuries.

Evaluation of a Pneumatic Vest to Treat Symptoms of ARDS Caused by COVID-19

Critical care patients who experience symptoms of acute respiratory distress syndrome are commonly placed on mechanical ventilators to increase the oxygen provided to their pulmonary systems and monitor their condition. With the pulmonary inflammation typically accompanying ARDS, patients can experience lower ventilation-perfusion ratios resulting in lower blood oxygenation. In these cases, patients are typically rotated into a prone position to facilitate improved blood flow to portions of the lung that were not previously participating in the gas exchange process. However, proning a patient increases the risk of complications, requires up to seven hospital staff members to carry out, and does not guarantee an improvement in the patient's condition. The low-cost vest presented here was designed to reproduce the effects of proning while also requiring less hospital staff than the proning process. Additionally, the V/Q Vest helps hospital staff predict whether patients would respond well to a proning treatment. A pilot study was conducted on nine patients with ARDS from Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The average increase in oxygenation with the V/Q Vest treatment for all patients was 19.7 ± 38.1%. Six of the nine patients responded positively to the V/Q Vest treatment, exhibiting increased oxygenation. The V/Q Vest also helped hospital staff predict that three of the five patients that were proned would experience an increase in oxygenation. An increase in oxygenation resulting from V/Q Vest treatment exceeded that of the proning treatment in two of these five proned patients.

Personalized Feeding Infusion Rate of Nutrition to Improve Glycemic Variability Control in Critical Care Patients

Control-based algorithms in the intensive care unit (ICU) patients have been developed to deliver a sufficient amount of insulin, but optimizing the rate of feeding of nutrition in ICU patients to improve glycemic variability control has not been done yet. Continuous feeding is commonly used for nutrition in critically ill patients who cannot be fed orally to maintain a normal blood sugar concentration, but optimizing its rate, for these individuals, is needed to avoid the adverse outcomes caused by medications such as insulin. This paper develops a control-based algorithm combines a predictive control algorithm with a revised nonlinear compartmental model used in the ICU to design personalized feeding function rates to improve patient glycemic variability. Our control algorithm is robust and acts very quickly to avoid medical intervention effects.

The Effect of Conservative Oxygen Therapy in Reducing Mortality in Critical Care Patients: A Meta-Analysis and Trial Sequential Analysis

Background: Conservative oxygen therapy can prevent both hypoxemia and hyperoxemia, but the effect on the prognosis of patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) remains controversial.Methods: All controlled studies comparing conservative oxygen therapy and conventional oxygen therapy in adult patients admitted to the ICU were searched. The primary outcome was mortality, and the secondary outcomes were length of ICU stay (ICU LOS), length of hospital stay (hospital LOS), length of mechanical ventilation (MV) hours, new organ failure during ICU stay, and new infections during ICU stay.Results: Nine trials with a total of 5,759 patients were pooled in our final studies. Compared with conventional oxygen therapy, conservative oxygen therapy did not reduce overall mortality (Z = 0.31, p = 0.75) or ICU LOS (Z = 0.17, p = 0.86), with firm evidence from trial sequential analysis, or hospital LOS (Z = 1.98, p = 0.05) or new infections during the ICU stay (Z = 1.45, p = 0.15). However, conservative oxygen therapy was associated with a shorter MV time (Z = 5.05, p < 0.00001), reduction of new organ failure during the ICU stay (Z = 2.15, p = 0.03) and lower risk of renal replacement therapy (RRT) (Z = 2.18, p = 0.03).Conclusion: Conservative oxygen therapy did not reduce mortality but did decrease MV time, new organ failure and risk of RRT in critically ill patients.Systematic Review Registration: identifier [CRD42020171055].

Utilisation of tracheostomy in patients with COVID-19 in England: patient characteristics, timing and outcomes

Objectives: We aimed to characterise the use of tracheostomy procedures for all COVID-19 critical care patients in England and to understand how patient factors and timing of tracheostomy affected outcomes. Design: A retrospective observational study using exploratory analysis of hospital administrative data. Setting: All 500 National Health Service hospitals in England. Participants: All hospitalised COVID-19 patients aged ≥ 18 years in England between March 1st and October 31st, 2020 were included. Main outcomes and measures: This was a retrospective exploratory analysis using the Hospital Episode Statistics administrative dataset. Multilevel modelling was used to explore the relationship between demographic factors, comorbidity and use of tracheostomy and the association between tracheostomy use, tracheostomy timing and the outcomes. Results: In total, 2,200 hospitalised COVID-19 patients had a tracheostomy. Tracheostomy utilisation varied substantially across the study period, peaking in April-June 2020. In multivariable modelling, for those admitted to critical care, tracheostomy was most common in those aged 40-79 years, in males and in people of Black and Asian ethnic groups and those with a history of cerebrovascular disease. In critical care patients, tracheostomy was associated with lower odds of mortality (OR: 0.514 (95% CI 0.443 to 0.596), but greater length of stay (OR: 41.143 (95% CI 30.979 to 54.642). In patients that survived, earlier timing of tracheostomy (≤ 14 days post admission to critical care) was significantly associated with shorter length of stay. Conclusions: Tracheostomy is safe and advantageous for critical care COVID-19 patients. Early tracheostomy may be associated with better outcomes, such as shorter length of stay, compared to late tracheostomy.