The Importance of Optimizing Ventilator Practices to Minimize VAC Risk

Grace Lee, MD, MPH, associate medical director, Infection Control, Boston Children’s Hospital, discusses the importance of optimizing ventilator practices to minimize the risk of VAC in hospital settings.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability).

“For the adult population, there’s been a lot of great work at looking at the impact of nurse-led and RT-led sedation and ventilator-weaning protocols to help prevent VAC. There was the recently published, actually last year, I believe, the ‘Wake Up and Breathe’ collaborative, that essentially demonstrated that these paired weaning protocols could lead to improvements in outcomes for patients, [such as] reductions in VAC, shorter duration of ventilation, and shorter lengths of stay.

I think that’s really compelling evidence that we need to think more broadly about how we’re addressing VAC as an entity. This actually puts us in new territory in that it’s going beyond infections to think[ing] more broadly and partner[ing] with our ICU colleagues, physicians, nurses, and respiratory therapists, in order to optimize our practices on the ventilator and minimize the risk of VAC."