ECMO

COVID is giving us familiarity with a number of medical procedures that in the past would have been so infrequently adopted that most of us were unaware of them.  The acronym here stands for Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation. The ECMO does the work of the heart and lungs when the patient’s organs can no longer function and is the highest level of life support provided.  The blood is rerouted through thin tubes into the ECMO where it is separated from an oxygen supply by a thin membrane, allowing oxygen to enter the blood stream. It is then returned to the patient’s blood system with the help of a pump (functioning as the heart would to move the blood along).

 The ECMO was originally developed to be used in open heart surgery.  But the demand for it for COVID patients in intensive care has increased steadily. This, combined with the fact that an individual patient can require ECMO support for some months and that each ECMO requires a specialist nurse to operate it, means that hospital resources are stretched.