Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation (PMV): When is it Justified in ICU?

Over years, the number of patients requiring prolonged mechanical ventilation (PMV) in ICU has increased. Trends in the numbers of patients requiring PMV are of interest to health service planners because they consume a disproportionate amount of healthcare resources, and have high illness costs.1 PMV is defined as need of invasive mechanical ventilation for consecutive 21 days for at least 6 hours per day. With improvement in ICU care more patients survive acute respiratory failure and with that number of patients requiring PMV is likely to increase further. In a large multi centric study in United Kingdom the incidence PMV was 4.4 per 100 ICU admissions, and 6.3 per 100 ventilated ICU admissions. Also these patients used 29.1% of all general ICU bed days, had longer hospital stay after ICU discharge than non-PMV patients and had higher hospital mortality (40.3% vs 33.8%, P = 0.02).2.