COVID-19 Critical Care: Understanding and Application

Learn to manage critical care patients whilst protecting yourself and your peers

“One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity: the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient”
Francis W. Peabody, Harvard Medical School 1925

This course focuses on the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but you will find key clinical updates from May/June 2021 in Week 4. The course remains open for you to use the resources and complete if you wish, but will no longer be facilitated. We hope you find the information useful.

Understanding critical care

You will learn the daily practice for frontline clinical staff supporting critical care patients with and without COVID-19, and how to apply ventilation and organ support principles to the care of a critically ill coronavirus patient.

Discover how to recognise, assess and manage deteriorating patients on the ward, and watch videos that demonstrate effective situation management in COVID-19 critical care.

Learn the fundamentals of COVID-19 and ventilation support

We provide information on a number of checklists, resources and guidelines being produced specifically for COVID-19 in order to assist healthcare teams with their clinical management and decision making.

In addition, we provide an overview of the basic principles of Ventilation and Organ Support. It will cover the pathophysiology of sepsis and ARDS, mechanical ventilation, shock, sepsis and septic shock, acute kidney injury, and haemofiltration. This will support a range of staff members, including those new to critical care.

The importance of staff well-being

It is important to recognise that we need to care for ourselves in order to care for our patients, relatives and colleagues. The final part of the course explores how our emotions impact our well-being and provides you with resources to support you at this time.

This course has been designed for frontline clinical staff who are caring for critically ill patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This includes a wide range of healthcare professionals in acute care, from many different clinical speciality backgrounds.

You may have some previous critical care experience or none.

The information will support those refreshing critical care knowledge and skills, newly qualified doctors, those who are upskilling, and those returning to acute clinical services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Welcome to COVID-19 Critical Care: Understanding and Application
• Getting Started
• Deteriorating Patient
• Deterioration in the Ward Patient
• Deterioration in the Intubated Patient
• Tracheostomy Emergencies
• Equipment Used in the Intubated Patient
• WHO E-Learning Package
• Resources
• Daily Practice of Critical Care
• Bedside Equipment
• Day-to-Day Critical Care
• WHO E-Learning Package
• Resources
• COVID-19 Specifics
• COVID-19 Critical Illness: Clinical Overview
• WHO E-Learning Package
• Donning and Doffing PPE
• Intubation
• Proning
• Resources
• Ventilation and Organ Support
• Respiratory Failure and Ventilation
• Shock
• Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) and Renal Replacement Therapy (RRT)
• WHO E-Learning Package
• Resources
• Self-care and Staff Well-being
• Introduction by Dorothy Armstrong
• Caring Human Factors: Understanding and Applying
• Amygdala Hijack: Understanding Our Fear
• Meeting Emotions: Facing Our Fear
• Self-compassion and Self-care
• Resources