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Oxygen therapy is a mainstay of critical care medicine, yet its optimal therapeutic use has not been systematically evaluated. A detailed understanding of current practice in oxygen therapy in intensive care is required to enable future interventional studies. We aimed to describe current oxygenation practice in patients requiring >48 hours of mechanical ventilation (MV) at an academic tertiary referral centre.

We collected longitudinal arterial blood gas and hourly oxygenation data from intensive care unit charts in a consecutive cohort of 40 trauma, 41 medical and 20 surgical patients for their first seven MV days, analysed data for 14,063 MV hours, and derived time-weighted averages (TWA) of variables for each 24-hour interval on MV for all patients.

The TWA-FiO₂ was 0.42 (95% CI 0.41 to 0.44) and TWA-SpO₂ was 97.1% (95% CI 96.8 to 97.4) for the first seven MV days. TWA-PaO₂ was >80 mmHg on 80% of MV …