Mechanical Ventilation CEU Courses for Respiratory Therapists

Mechanical ventilator alarms are vital for monitoring patients and the ventilator's status. The Joint Commission addresses this patient safety issue by including alarm safety as a National Patient Safety Goal. The course reviews alarm fatigue occurring when practitioners ignore important alerts, risking harm to patients, and it is crucial to set them correctly based on patient conditions and standards to ensure safety.

Review the basics of ventilator waveforms, including time scalars and loops. Discuss interventions with abnormal waveforms.

Interpreting ventilator graphics can yield valuable real-time data in patients undergoing invasive mechanical ventilation. This course demystifies the complexities of troubleshooting changes in compliance and elastance using ventilator scalars.

Mechanical power pertains to the energy applied to the lungs of mechanically ventilated patients. We discuss approaches to minimizing mechanical power and the sequelae of excessive mechanical power.

The essence of weaning is that critically-ill patients can resume unassisted breathing when minute ventilation demands and mechanical disturbances in the pulmonary system improve enough that their respiratory muscles can handle increased workloads without developing fatigue. Therefore, this lecture explains how respiratory muscle physiology is impacted by pulmonary disease and also how ventilator strategies either facilitate or stymie weaning. Both aspects are essential for clinicians to master the art of weaning.

We largely think about mechanical ventilation focused on the future, at the cost of not appreciating how past practices still influence current understanding about the care we give: often to our detriment. This lecture is a story of how we arrived at this moment and describes how artificial intelligence might revolutionize how we deliver care in the near future.

Using airway pressure measurements to assess potential lung injury is limited because it represents stress applied to both the lung and chest wall. This lecture describes the technique of measuring esophageal pressure to isolate lung stress, and uses a clinical scenario to demonstrate how this helps setting the ventilator in severe ARDS.

Interpreting ventilator graphics can yield valuable real-time data in patients undergoing invasive mechanical ventilation. This course helps demystify the complexities of troubleshooting obstructive airflow physiology and trending changes in severity using ventilator scalars.

Various methods have been developed over the past half-century to set and evaluate the effects of PEEP. This presentation describes the 6 methods used to assess both lung recruitment and deleterious effects of PEEP.

Children can be safely and efficiently weaned from mechanical ventilation and then successfully extubated. This introductory course reviews weaning guidelines and methods during the various phases of mechanical ventilation.