What happens as soon as you switch on the MEDUVENT Standard?
There’s a moment that every paramedic is familiar with. The patient’s condition changes, and now you need a different kind of support to what you needed thirty seconds ago.
It may be necessary to switch suddenly from mask ventilation to invasive ventilation. It may be necessary to switch from pre-oxygenation to full anaesthetic support. At that moment, the last thing you want is to have to reach for another piece of equipment.
The more important question to ask yourself about a ventilator is not how light it is or how long the battery lasts, but what happens when the situation is no longer so straightforward. Does the equipment adapt to you, or does it get in your way?
It starts even before you’ve made a single decision
When a team connects a new patient to the machine, they enter their gender and height.
The MEDUVENT Standard from WEINMANN then calculates the ideal body weight and sets the ventilation parameters, rather than the healthcare professional having to select a tidal volume and respiratory rate from memory or using a table.
Weinmann cites a 2004 study in Critical Care Medicine ⑴ on ventilation-induced lung injury as the reason: ideal body weight is important for how a patient is ventilated. Whether you’ve read that article or not, the practical effect is the same. It’s one less calculation you have to get right whilst someone is struggling to breathe right in front of you.
A single device for resuscitation, non-invasive support and induction
Paramedics do not usually run into problems because a single piece of equipment was not powerful enough.
It is often the case that a team has been trained on one type of resuscitation equipment, another for non-invasive support and a third for anaesthetic induction, and under pressure, muscle memory does not always switch smoothly between these devices.
MEDUVENT Standard does all three. It facilitates manual CPR via the MEDUtrigger, whereby the pressure is automatically limited to the set limit once it is reached halfway through the compression.
It provides non-invasive ventilation in CPAP or CPAP+ASB mode, for example in cases of pulmonary oedema or a flare-up of COPD. And for rapid induction, it can guide a patient through pre-oxygenation, switch to manual mode for tube insertion and then continue with continuous ventilation, without the need to switch to another device.
For a team, this means just one interface that you need to be thoroughly familiar with. For those managing the equipment, it means one less family of devices to keep in stock, maintain and retrain staff to use.
None of this forces a healthcare professional to use a default setting. The inspiratory trigger can be adjusted from very sensitive to very insensitive, depending on the patient’s own effort. The expiratory trigger determines how long the pressure support lasts. The pressure ramp – flat, moderate or steep – determines how gradually or how rapidly the pressure increases from PEEP to the full inspiratory pressure.
In A&E, there’s rarely just one setting that’s right, and thanks to these options, there doesn’t need to be.
What changes when the air itself poses a danger?
In the fields of defence and tactical medicine, there is a scenario for which standard emergency care is rarely prepared: the ambient air itself poses a threat. MEDUVENT Standard offers an option for this. A CBRN adapter replaces the standard hygiene filter and is connected to a compatible CBRN filter. The ventilation circuit switches to a special CBRN patient valve. This mode can be activated before a mission begins, or partway through if conditions change.
The device itself remains the same. Weinmann emphasises that the ventilation modes and operation in CBRN mode remain unchanged. Teams still need to be trained in dealing with CBRN hazards themselves – that remains the case – but they do not also need to learn how to use a new ventilation interface. And because the option can be installed on individual devices, a fleet does not need to upgrade everything at once, but only those devices that are actually deployed to the location where the threat is present.
What it all comes down to
MEDUVENT Standard does not require compressed oxygen to operate. This is common knowledge. What is more important is what the device does whilst it is running: calculating parameters rather than leaving them to guesswork, guiding a patient through resuscitation and induction without having to switch equipment, and adapting to a contaminated environment without the crew having to learn how to use a new device.
Let’s go back for a moment to that paramedic mentioned at the start of this piece – the one whose patient had just experienced a change in condition. It’s not about the MEDUVENT Standard looking impressive on paper. It’s about the fact that, thirty seconds later, they’re still holding the very same device in their hands.