Ventilation and Resuscitation Training- V.A.R.T.

The VART, or Ventilation and Resuscitation Training, is designed to be intuitively conceptual. We want you to be able to use the VART acronym tool to approach and maintain your patients on mechanical ventilation. However, we do not just want to help you understand HOW to set them up, but we also want to help you think through common and uncommon mechanical ventilation issues. Moreover, we want your ventilator set up to mitigate any alarms that can be set off erroneously. We hope you'll see as you progress through the book and training the mechanical ventilator is an enigma that is absolutely tamable. VART will act as a template for which to begin approaching mechanical ventilation patients. It will be useful for what we call type 1 and type 2 ventilator problems. Type 1 mechanical ventilation problems are those that require a 'from scratch' approach. In these types of ventilator problems, the clinician must ensure adequate perfusion, calculate initial ventilator settings, confirm these initial settings are therapeutically reaching the patient, and then make safe adjustments based on SpO2 and EtCO2. Type 2 is much simpler. In type 2 ventilator problems, the ventilator is already initiated and the clinician's job is to ensure the patient is receiving appropriate and therapeutic mechanical ventilation. If not, they must make safe corrections and then reassess. THE VART ACRONYM While VART stands for the name, Ventilation and Resuscitation Training, the primary VART acronym tool used to assess and manage patients represents four areas of management: Verify, Assess, Revise, and Trend. For each of these 4 areas of management there are secondary VART Acronyms, or subdomains to be used to guide ventilator and patient management. The secondary VART acronym subdomains will be explained in their respective sections.