Lung-draining ‘turning teams’ may be the next evolution in COVID-19 care

As they became inundated with patients suffering severe respiratory distress from the coronavirus last month, a group of nurses at a Long Island hospital snapped into action and created a “turning team.”
The eight-member squad at Huntington Hospital — including nurses, doctors and orderlies — works to turn critically ill patients in the throes of COVID-19 on their stomachs to allow gravity to remove mucus buildup in their lungs.
“We think this is helpful because in other similar lung conditions, we have found it to work in the past,” said Michael Grosso, the medical director. “Keeping patients prone opens both the airways and gets more oxygen into air sacs and improves circulation to the lungs.”
The relatively simple procedure, which is also being used in some  New York City hospitals when overwhelmed staff is available, was found to help patients at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, according to a study published last week by the American Thoracic Society’s “American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.”
A lung specialist at NYU Langone told The Post that the hospital is “proning patients” both in and out of intensive care.

“Most of the proning we are doing is manual and takes several people to do,” said Dr. Daniel Sterman.
Although some hospitals have special beds that will turn the patients automatically, patients who are intubated and hooked up to a respirator and other life-saving devices need to be turned manually, with the aid of a dedicated team, health care professionals said.
“Don’t forget that these are patients who are usually already receiving mechanical ventilation, with a breathing tube in their wind pipe, and tubes that are placed into their blood vessels, and when you are turning a patient under those circumstances, it requires several people,” said Grosso, whose 270-bed hospital has 200 patients suffering from COVID-19.
https://nypost.com/2020/04/04/lung-draining-turning-teams-may-be-step-in-covid-19-care/