Sometimes patients need the help of a breathing tube, or endotracheal tube. Eventually, we can remove these tubes, which is referred to as an extubation. Unplanned extubations occur when the breathing tube comes out before the patient is ready.
Why Is It Important?
Unplanned extubations can cause complications for patients. And despite the severity, it's one of the more common incidents that happens in critical care. Making sure we're tracking and reducing these incidents is in the best interests of our patients.
How Do We Measure Unplanned Extubations?
We count the number of ventilator days across all patients in our NICU and PICU. For every 100 ventilator days, we count the number of unplanned extubations.
Year | Unplanned Extubations | Benchmark |
---|---|---|
2019 | 0.16 | 0.80 |
2020 | 0.09 | 0.80 |
2021 | 0.11 | 0.80 |
2022 | 0.18 | 0.80 |
2023 | 0.14 | 0.80 |
How Do We Reduce the Number of Unplanned Extubations?
We follow specific policies and procedures to help prevent these incidents. During rounds, we'll check the positioning and integrity of these breathing tubes, and make sure they're secure.
If an unplanned extubation does happen, our multidisciplinary team will investigate it, with the goal of preventing it from happening again.