Understanding Mechanical Ventilation

I think your best bet in finding information on this would be to do a search of the professional nursing journals. Look for articles on mechanical ventilation and respiratory assistance. Copy the articles that seem relevant to what you are looking for. Beside general nursing journals there must be journals for intensive care nursing published in your country as well. I don't know what you have available in Australian libraries, but here in the U.S. we have some very good health science libraries that have huge collections of journals published by just about every professional healthcare discipline. We can enlist the help of the librarians to help us find this information and get our hands on it. I can't imagine that it wouldn't be the same in your country as well.

Another suggestion I would make would be to do an Internet search for the websites of the professional organizations of intensive care nurses in your country. I would also look for websites of respiratory therapists. I would check them out and search each site for keywords (like ventilator, oxygen therapy).

Some years ago I was trying to educate myself on chest tubes and how they worked. I went to the health sciences library at the university near where I lived and did a search of the nursing literature and xeroxed a bunch of articles on how chest tubes worked. Some of them were 10 years old! But when I was done I knew my chest tubes!

However, I will do a quick search and see what web sites I can come up with in the States for you. :)

You know all my way through school I struggled with a couple of areas renal and neuro. Hated CNS. Ended up working in both areas once qualified and then found it easy to understand. I am a hands on Nurse and sometimes need to do or see it before it all falls into place.

Can you not get in touch with ICU and see if there is somebody who can talk you through machine with actual patient and then go back and read text??? I know it would be possible in UK but not so sure if you can do this in US/Australia?

Go to www.nurses.info. When you get to this site, type in the word "ventilation" in the Quick Search box and click on "search". Four hits are displayed. Click on the third hit (Nursing Tutorials). When you get to the next web page there will be a listing of things. Click on Critical Care Medicine Tutorials. On the next web page that appears click on Respiratory Failure. Voila! You are there. (I'm sorry, I'm not good with this hyperlink stuff.) Pick your subject. Explore them all. Knock yourself out.

I browsed around this Respiratory Failure site and thought it was pretty good. They talked about flow rates and PEEP and there was stuff on indications for putting a patient on ventilation assistance. But, then again, I'm not sure what you are looking for exactly. What was nice about this site was that there are arrows at the bottom of each page that you can click on to advance forward in the presentation so you don't have to keep going back to the title page.

I tried to get into the site for the Australian Journal of Nursing and couldn't get in.

Now, The American Journal of Nursing. Their web site is www.ajnonline.com. I did a search on their site for "mechanical ventilation" and a bunch of articles came up. Unfortunately, to view them costs $19.95 (U.S. dollars). Don't you dare pay that kind of money. Get the names and issues of the articles that interest you off the site (that's free) and then look them up in a library (or ask a librarian to do it for you).

Again, I really think that you are going to have to go to the professional journals or textbooks, mate. I just don't see this kind of information being out there on the Internet. Maybe someone else has some other ideas.

I hope you can get into this awesome web site. I am sure you will find the information you are looking for in it. Have fun! Hope to hear that you become the authority on ventilation among your classmates!