ALL MY PATIENTS HOW TO

Several months ago, Ely spoke with AAMCNews about his innovative work, the role of humanism in medicine, and how he’s managed to persevere despite numerous obstacles in his path. You can’t be a doctor with science alone.” The goal, he said, is to “find the person in the patient.” In a discussion about medical education, Ely urged an approach that merges science and humanism. In one powerful example of such an approach, Ely called to the stage the wife of a former ICU patient whose bedside wedding Ely facilitated and who spoke of her enduring gratitude that “they made us a family.” Ely added: “The power of love is greater than science.” “Let’s pay attention to things like putting touch before technology.” “Let’s commit ourselves to re-humanization,” he said. “If we take it slow and make it patient-centered and don’t try to get at the whole program, we can change the culture.”īut to truly achieve appropriate ICU treatment, honoring the entirety of the patient - mind, body, and spirit - is crucial, Ely emphasized. Instead, it involves a doctor and nurse working together at the bedside to apply the appropriate steps and monitor their effects each day. He noted that restoring better practices is not about distributing protocols on a piece of paper. “I never want to practice medicine that way again.” ” But measures like keeping patients from their families was wrong, Ely said. “We were scared, we didn’t have vaccines, we didn’t have.

Such changes, now known as the ABCDEF bundle, allowed patients to achieve greater mobility, gain mental clarity, and renew the personal connections vital to healing.ĭuring COVID-19, though, an influx of patients and the challenges posted by a previously unknown virus drove ICUs to revert to longer sedation and immobilization. The approach Ely helped establish includes using less sedation - which previously had been considered essential for keeping patients calm - and weaning patients off ventilators more quickly. In a session moderated by Khalilah Gates, MD, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Northwestern Medicine, Ely outlined decades of research proving that previous standards of ICU care often created serious new problems for those whose lives it saved. “And then COVID hit, and the whole thing skyrocketed back to 80%.”

“, we had seen rates of delirium of 70% to 80%, but we tore that down,” he said. As he described in his 2022 book, Every Deep-Drawn Breath, he and others eventually developed, implemented, and proved the efficacy of new approaches that were adopted at thousands of hospitals worldwide. 14 in Nashville, Tennessee.Įly, a professor of critical care medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, went on to pose an even more painful question: What if we had started those crucial steps and then stopped?Įly was referring to extensive research proving that certain ICU practices had long caused harm to patients, including brain-damaging delirium.

ALL MY PATIENTS HOW TO

“What if I told you that we knew, through an evidence-based approach, how to reduce death, reduce length of stay, reduce cost of care - and we weren’t using It?” Intensive care unit (ICU) expert Wes Ely, MD, MPH, raised that question at Learn Serve Lead 2022: The AAMC Annual Meeting on Nov. ICU expert Wes Ely, MD, PhD, urged listeners at Learn Serve Lead 2022: The AAMC Annual Meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, to add the human touch to critical care.

All my patients