Survival can seem like the only goal during a stay in a hospital’s intensive care unit. But for many patients, the aftermath can be just as harrowing. Now, an international initiative has launched support groups designed to help those who have left the ICU — if they can be persuaded to come in and talk about their struggles.
“There’s this broad world that exists between surviving and recovering,” said Dr. Daniela Lamas, a critical care doctor who works in the ICU at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Some patients return home disabled, unable to work or even care for themselves. Others are traumatized by being put on life support. Caregivers struggle, too; they may still be reeling from days or weeks fearing the worst. Doctors have given those symptoms an umbrella diagnosis: post-intensive care syndrome, or PICS.
“It evolved from, ‘I’m so excited to be home, I can’t wait to eat,’ into, ‘Oh, my God, what am I gonna do? I need to make a living and I can’t work,’” said Rob Rainer, who spent four weeks in a medically induced coma in a New Hampshire ICU.
An estimated 5.7 million adults are cared for in ICUs in the U.S. each year. About 1 million of those patients require mechanical ventilation to control their breathing — which can be both mentally and physically traumatic. Physicians also suspect that the chaotic atmosphere of an ICU — the bright lights, clanging alarms, and high-stakes interventions — can leave patients deeply disturbed even after they’re discharged.
So the Society of Critical Care Medicine, a nonprofit group for ICU providers, doled out $5,000 each to five hospitals in 2015 to help the facilities launch support groups, with the dual goal of assisting patients and informing research. There are now 17 support groups spanning the globe, from a VA center in Nashville, Tenn., to a university hospital in London.
There’s just one problem: They’re struggling to get survivors and caregivers to show up.
“We’ve had trouble getting a lot of people to come on a regular basis. And by a lot of people, I mean people,” Lamas said.
It’s a similar story across the country. “The recruitment has been very difficult,” said Adair Andrews, who works for the Society of Critical Care Medicine and helps run the program. Sometimes, the doctors and counselors running the groups just sit and chat with one another, leaving tables full of bagels, orange juice, and coffee untouched.
The lack of participation doesn’t necessarily mean patients aren’t in need — in many cases, they just don’t know to look for the resources that now exist.
“For people to even look online for a support group assumes a level of knowledge about post-ICU that doesn’t really exist among laypeople,” Lamas said. Part of the problem, she said, is that people often seek out resources for a condition or injury, not an experience. They might attend an advanced cancer support group, or search for resources for surviving sepsis.
“People don’t necessarily define themselves as survivors of the ICU,” she said.
“People don’t necessarily define themselves as survivors of the ICU.”
Dr. Daniela Lamas
For Rainer, it was pneumonia that put him in intensive care. Specifically, necrotizing bacterial pneumonia, which took hold in January 2015. His organs began to shut down. Doctors put Rainer, now 54, into a medically induced coma. His wife, elderly parents, and three children sat by his side, hearing many days that doctors weren’t confident he’d make it through the next.
His family’s ordeal hit Rainer once he was discharged after two months — and with it crept in a sense of guilt, followed by deep anxiety about money. Rainer was a lawyer, but now couldn’t work. As he tried to recover his strength and mobility during rehab sessions at home, he panicked about his family, his finances, and his future.
“I started to realize the circumstances I was going to have to live in because of my experience,” said Rainer, who at times speaks softly and much more slowly than he once did. He believes the change is due to oxygen deprivation during his ICU stay. When he arrived home, he couldn’t walk very far. He couldn’t make it to the bathroom by himself at night. It was two months before he was strong enough to shower.
“That first shower was excruciating,” he said.
He needed help coping with his PICS — but he had no idea he had the condition. Even if he did, he wouldn’t have known where to look for resources.
“I had just come out of this crazy experience,” he said, “and there was no resource for me to go to talk about some of the things I didn’t understand.”
It was only when a friend’s wife’s sister — who happened to be a critical care doctor — introduced him to Lamas that his confusion about his symptoms began to unravel. The fact that it took such a circuitous connection to meet a doctor who knew about PICS is a problem, Rainer said.
“I had just come out of this crazy experience, and there was no resource for me to go to talk about some of the things I didn’t understand.”
Rob Rainer, patient
“If not for that, I might very well still be struggling to understand what the heck was, is, and will be wrong with me,” he said. It’s critical for ICU staff at every hospital to be well-versed in PICS to prepare patients, he said.
Rainer is one of just a handful of patients who has attended the group led by Lamas.
One obstacle: It’s tricky to track down potential participants. In the ICU, there’s a crisis around every corner. When patients and families are so focused on surviving another day, there isn’t necessary a good time for a tough talk about what comes next.
“If the person’s not dead, that’s fantastic. Thinking about what life might be like afterwards with nuance is really hard to do at the time when you’re in the ICU,” said Lamas.
And after the ICU, many survivors go back to seeing their primary care doctors, occupational therapists, or specialists for their specific condition; those providers might not have the training to recognize ICU-related trauma.
There are logistical hurdles, too. Some patients live hours from the hospitals where they were treated. It may also be psychologically tough to return: In some cases, doctors have chosen to hold their support groups in coffee shops or restaurants, because patients are too traumatized to return to the hospital.
For others, the very challenges that warrant support make it hard to get to a support group — the walk from a parking lot into a hospital might be too tiring, for example.
Some groups have tried brochures to draw in new patients, while others doctors have brought the meetings up in follow-up visits with patients.
At Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, support group organizers waited each meeting for someone to show up. Month after month, the rooms were empty.
“We’d think, ‘OK, next month, next month,’” said Annie Johnson, a nurse practitioner at Mayo Clinic who started the hospital’s support group. And then finally, a patient’s wife came. But with just one attendee, it wasn’t a support group, per se — it was just a caregiver and an ICU provider, talking about what to expect in the coming months over a cup of coffee.
Johnson said she isn’t taking the slow start as a defeat. Instead, she and others are exploring new tools for outreach, such as an online support community for ICU survivors and their families. It’s done well: Even critical care nurses and doctors join the online conversation.
One patient shared the story of her five-day stay in the ICU battling sepsis and kidney failure.
“I was sometimes halfway aware of my surroundings, or activities happening to me and around me,” she wrote in a post. Her husband struggled to come to terms with what was happening as she waded in and out of awareness. Now, after a liver and kidney transplant, things have settled down a bit.
The wife of an ICU survivor replied to that post. She said she found it reassuring to hear another person’s experience, and wanted to know how to better help her husband after his own health scare.
She asked a simple question: “Other than the passing of time, what helped you get past it all?”
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Mavis, if that is all true I’m shocked. Thankful (as always) for our NHS x
The industry depends on these people not showing up. Someone should be asking why they want the survivors to show up. It is unlikely these Industry funded, and designed groups will have any beneficial effects, but they are a great for giving the false appearance that something was done.
There has been no research at all on this topic, and certainty no attempt to minimize this kind of trauma. Te only research is done by marketers and industry spin people to minimize the numbers of people traumatized.
Patients that wake up during surgery, are another groups they had to shut down, discredit and minimize. Typically the patient is at fault, and threatening letters form the hospitals lawyers, during their recovery from surgery, will ensure they don’t speak of it.
These spin campaigns are the work of clever industry ghouls, they could not have people bringing any of it to light. They hired clever psychologists to tailor these programs, and obscure the facts. They do occasional industry funded research to cast doubt o the experiences, minimize them, and even traumatize patients to silence them.
No research on post ICU patient care needs? Have a look online there have been thousands of papers on this topic.
Practice is constantly evolving, to minimise ICU delirium, ventilator associated infections, sedation days, ICU stay duration etc. etc.
Practice in critical care is constantly evolving to provide better outcomes for our patients – and yes… it is all research driven.
Thank you: a UK based Advanced Critical Care Practitioner.
The British are studying it, while here in the US, they are figuring out ways to silence the survivors. A lot of American patients probably go stern lectures from hospital employed “patient advocates” telling them that the distress is an indicator of mental illness. Britain has an entirely different system, not based on profit. It is more profitable for American hospitals to set up these groups, so they can directly influence and shut down discussion. In Britain the industry would have a reason to study this, and make corrections to procedures if possible.
The Industry here in the US found that denial and blaming the patient is just more profitable. Iatrogenic Trauma is not discussed anymore, and according to the industry, studying it, could expose it. In Post Fact America it is just more profitable to deny, delay and whenever possible attack the traumatized patients that experience it.
Those groups are pure marketing and PR, since they have nothing for this kind of trauma, in fact they make it worse by denying it. They Gas Light patients. No one ever tracked any of this.
Some of this trauma was caused by the doctors and medical staff. A middle of the night vaginal exam, on a teen age patient, who awakens to a Doctor, and a bunch of interns standing around while the Doctor tried to jam his fist into her vagina. These things and much worse happen all of the time when people are hospitalized. Patients are a captive audience, and they know the hospital lawyers will defend them and undermine the patient, especially if they are female.
We don’t see these topic covered anymore. They are effectively censored, the industry had to shut down any opportunity to discuss these ongoing traumas. They monitored patient groups online, in order to shut down or direct the conversation to one that supports the industry.
Hi-
I just found this article that has US and Intermational support groups. I have not looked any further than the article. Hope this helps: http://www.myicucare.org/Thrive/Pages/Find-In-Person-Support-Groups.aspx
Hi-
I just found this article that has US and Intermational support groups. I have not looked any further than the article. Hope this helps: http://www.myicucare.org/Thrive/Pages/Find-In-Person-Support-Groups.aspxhttp://www.myicucare.org/Thrive/Pages/Find-In-Person-Support-Groups.aspx
I wish I could find a ICU support group. I wish I could talk to someone about my ordeal with ICU psychosis. It was awful and almost two years later I’m still suffering PTSD. I’ve changed from who I was pre critical illness. I am full of anxiety and fear. My psychiatrist gives me pills but none work. I don’t have anyone to talk to. I admit I feel a little better knowing i am not alone with this. I don’t know how I will be day to day. My inner peace is gone. I live in hell every day. Your article is very helpful to me. Thank you.
I was in the ICU for 4 1/2 Months the another 3 1/2 in rehab trying to learn how to walk again. My wife was with me every step of the way. I am now disabled and can’t work i was always the bread winner. My wife never had to work. Now she takes care of me life is very different now. We would both like to go to a support group. We live in Cookeville Tn.
My brother is in the Heart ICU. I feel like I have no one to talk to. I can talk but I need more. He is 45 years old. My baby brother. My mom is my sounding board, she is in her own hell. Can not give her any of mine.
Sounds as if what you need is not so much talking, but aid and direction to genuine help. I don’t know the particulars of your situation but if he’s dischargeable, press the hospital staff, particularly if uncertainty about where he will end up after discharge is a critical worry for both you and your mom. You want legitimate avenues of help, not just the first option at the top of their list. Under new health care rules, successful outcomes of treatment are being given greater emphasis because hospitals don’t want readmissions. Not too many patients and families are aware of this but the hospitals most certainly are. Good luck and Godspeed.
I wish we’d had this available when my husband suffered a massive stroke at the age of 59 some years ago. Prior, he’d been physically fit with no chronic illness. While he was in the ICU the hospital chaplain spoke with me so I knew it was serious, but I also sensed that he was inside that body on the bed. The doctors who did the intervention that saved his life were very forthcoming with me on the work they did to save him, and the odds — saying he would come out of it with deficits but the extent wouldn’t be known right away. The ICU nurses were also very compassionate and attentive. The worst happened not in the hospital ICU but in the sub-acute aftercare facility to which he was discharged. It wasn’t our preferred choice; the one we wanted wasn’t equipped to take patients with respiratory issues. When he was admitted to the sub-acute — in the week between Christmas and New Year — the covering doctor, before my husband was even evaluated, told me that the treatment plan there was meant to be short-term — weeks — and advised me to hunt out a nursing home and palliative care. THAT was the part that gave me a serious case of PICS. I had a fulltime job at the time that I needed to keep. Sub-acute staff ignored requests from me, from family (among them, health-care professionals) and our medical-care advocate. Fortunately, the nursing home he spent a few months in after that didn’t write him off so readily; their excellent rehabilitative work restored him enough to come home with me. But years later I still have panic attacks late at night about what he went thru in the sub-acute and wondering what I could have done to make the outcome better, if I’d just quit my job to advocate fulltime and play my ‘I’m a healthcare reporter’ card. So, it’s not just the ICU if you’re dealt a bad hand with aftercare.
Not sure if it’s the same in the US, but most U.K. most hospitals run a ICU clinic to which ICU patients are invited. The invitation is by letter and telephone and the session is 1:1 with trained personnel. The attendance to these clinics is pretty good, and from them the survivors are referred onto ‘ICU Steps’ a group for survivors that is very well attended. PICS is also addressed before it starts here, by Drs, Nurses, Relatives and other carers completing a patient diary so that the patient can begin to piece together what is lost or distorted through their ICU journey on their recovery. More info for survivors can be found at:
http://www.icusteps.org
Many thanks, an Advanced Critical Care Practitioner in the U.K.
Dear Kim,
My son is a PICS survivor, and as his primary caregiver we would love to join an online support group but don’t know where to find them. Did you ever find one, and if so, could you please share that information?
Thank you so much for any assistance!
Best wishes, Ellen Keenan
Great article! It’s so important to get the word out about help for the survivors. Can you post links for the online website as well as the places that are offering support groups? Thanks.
I am so happy to hear of these efforts I was at BWH after the birth of my daughter in the ICU for septic shock. I could have used such support; nothing was offered. I’d love to hear about more programs.
Dear Kim,
My son is a PICS survivor, and as his primary caregiver we would love to join an online support group but don’t know where to find them. Did you ever find one, and if so, could you please share that information?
Thank you so much for any assistance!
Best wishes, Ellen Keenan
Dear Kim,
My son is a PICS survivor, and as his primary caregiver we would love to join an online support group but don’t know where to find them. Did you ever find one, and if so, could you please share that information?
Thank you so much for any assistance!
Best wishes, Ellen Keenan