Grant: Summer Program in Aging

Canadians are getting older and are more likely to need heart surgery as they age, as it is still the best treatment for certain heart diseases. When older adults need to have heart surgery, they tend to stay longer on a breathing machine and in the intensive care unit (ICU), lose weight and muscle, are less steady on their feet, have a harder time driving, and as a result may require to somewhere other than their own home after hospital discharge. Furthermore, are also more likely to be confused after their surgery (known as delirium), to need to go back to hospital after going home, are not as mentally quick as they used to be. Altogether, this collection of conditions is called post-intensive care syndrome (PICS) and may be caused, at least in part, by a long stay in an ICU. My research has three aims to change this syndrome in older adult who need life-saving heart surgery. In Aim 1, we will do a detailed review of all past research to learn what is currently known about the mental and physical symptoms of PICS after heart surgery. This will give us a starting point of what is known and what we need to improve on. For Aim 2, we will directly work with patients and caregivers who had a long stay in the ICU after heart surgery to learn from their experiences about why PICS happens and their ideas about how we can develop, real-world changes to care in the ICU to prevent this from happening in the future. Aim 3 will then conduct a randomized controlled trial to determine if the patient/ caregiver-identified solutions to test if the developed ideas are useful in the ICU and if they prevent PICS from happening following heart surgery. We predict that solutions that patients come up with will be practical and useful in the ICU and that they will prevent PICS. By preventing PICS, we predict that older adult patients will have a quicker recovery and better quality of life after heart surgery.