Neonatal ventilators: Whats good, what could beter?

[Rick Meerkerk]

Hello,

I am a student and I have to make a comparison of neonatal ventilators. So I like to know your experiences with ventilators, such like:

- Avea from Cardinal health

- Babylog 8000 plus

- Bear Cup 750 and Bird VIP

- Carestation from GE

- E100, E150 and E500 form Newport

- Inter 3 and Inter Neo from Intermed

- IV100 and Millenium from Sechrist

- Leoni & Leoni plus

- Servo-I Infant

- SLE 2000 HFO and SLE 5000

- Stephanie

I am looking forward to read your experiences!

---

Rick Meerkerk

Student Rotterdam University

Health Technology

The Netherlands

[JACK]

I have worked with quite a few ventilators. Though some have more features than others, what I have learned is that the outcome of the patient is more dependent on the familiarity and experience of the team handling the ventilator than the functions in the ventilator.

If my team is experienced with Babylog ventilator, and we are given a newer ventilator with more functions, the patient outcome will be worse of with the newer ventilator than the older one. So be careful in drawing conclusions regarding which is better than the other.

It is good to learn to use a few models of ventilator and become an expert in those models. It really makes a difference to patient outcome.

[Guest drsivjir]

Our unit in AIMS,Cochin,Kerala,India,have Babylog ventilators as well as SLE 2000 HFO Plus.

We are very much comfortable with Dragger Babylog machine especially regarding ventilation of preterm and babies who are <1500 grams.The volume Garenteed support mode is especially good to assess how much is the lung improvement and how much the baby is able to generate the volume by itself, so it is considered as a better weaning mode.

SLE ventilator is able to handle babies >3kg may be up to 10-12kg, so we are using it preferably for the term babies and those who require HFOV.

Every ventilator can be familiarized only by routine use of it.Without using commenting about the other ventilators are not possible

The newer generation of SLE and Stephanie are having soft screen touch modes and give beautiful graphics of the pulmonary functions

[Rick Meerkerk]

Thanks for the answers! Thank you Jack for your 'warning' feedback! I realy hope more people shall answer.

[Stefan Johansson]

I completely agree with JACKs first post, that the driver is more important than the machine.

I remember Martin Keszler speaking on HFOV long ago. Experimental data on HFOV was very promising in terms of clinical outcomes, but results from clinical trials was not that convincing. One of his comment of this discrepancy was that HFOV, being a very powerful tool, was put in hands of people at the beginning of the HFOV learning curve.

My personal experience is limited to Stephanie, Leoni PLus and Drager Babylog. Given that fact that (tidal) volume matters more than pressure when it comes to lung injury, some kind of volume control is needed. Through various ways, this can be achieved with all those three machines.

[Alexander Rakow]

Still, ventilators are different.

It would be great if we could receive reviews on neonatal ventilators to our review's section

http://www.99nicu.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=140

[bidhupillai]

I personally feel Drager Baby log is the best one for babies <1500 gram...It has ony 6 knobs to handle and anybody could familiarize with it fast....

[Guest Dukstar]

We have a unit where we train many junior residents. Babylog 8000, with its easy-to-use knobs is really easy to manage.But, in pulmonary graphs, it is quite poor, but how many of us rely on pulmonary graphics?

Edited April 6, 2009 by Dukstar

[bidhupillai]

Yes,I agree that Drager babylog 8000 has got poor graphics.But we can fix an additional monitor on top of that paying extra money,we really follow the graphics and make adjustment accordingly.The Maquet servo i comes with good monitor ,we dont really need to pay any extra for that.but its good only for term babies........................

[Rick Meerkerk]

I understand after reading and asking in some Dutch hospitals that the babylog is not strong enough to breathe babies above 1.2 kilogram. So I want to know why you just are using the babylog. Are there no alternatives?

Thank you for your reactions!

So far I aim me especially at the

- Babylog from Dräger

- Leoni plus from Heinen & Löwenstein

- Servo-i Infant from Maquet

- SLE 5000 from SLE

- Stephanie from Stephan

These are not bad, but some do have better functions which what?