Modern ECMO: why an ECMO programme in a tertiary care hospital

Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) represents a useful tool to support the lungs and the heart when all conventional therapies failed and the patients are at risk of death. While the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO) collects data from different institutions that joined the Registry and reports overall outcome, individual centres often collide with results below expectations, either in adults and in paediatric population. Some authors suggest that poor outcomes could be overcome with a programme dedicated to ECMO, with specialized professionals adequately trained on ECMO and with a consistent number of procedures. In 2012, The IRCCS PSD ECMO Programme was instituted with the specific aim of achieving better results than hitherto obtained. After only 1 year of activity, the results justified the programme, with a better survival rate for each group investigated, particularly in adults, but surprisingly in paediatrics too, where the results were better than what reported by ELSO. Although the number of patients treated with ECMO is still growing up, the effects of the ECMO programme continue to exert a positive action on outcome even now. The present article reports data on survival, blood loss, and blood consumption during ECMO in the last few years at our institution.