What is Critical Care?
Critical care is the provision of specialised, continuous, multidisciplinary care for patients in a serious or life-threatening, but treatable, condition, who require some or all of the following:
Although critical care needs an intensive input of resources for a small fraction of a hospitals in-patients, critical care provides an essential enabling and underpinning service, without which a hospital would be unable to conduct most or all of its planned and unplanned activity. The resources that go into a critical care bed, should therefore be valued against the activities and care throughout the hospital, that the availability of that bed allows to happen.
- much closer observation and clinical interventions that cannot be provided on a standard hospital ward
- constant attention from specialist nursing and therapy staff at a higher ratio of staff to patients than on a general hospital ward.
- continuous, uninterrupted physiological monitoring, supervised by staff who are able to interpret and immediately act on the information.
- continuous clinical direction and care from a trained specialist consultant-led team
- support for one or more of their vital organs such as their lungs, heart or kidneys.
- Advanced therapies which are only safe to administer in the critical care environment
Although critical care needs an intensive input of resources for a small fraction of a hospitals in-patients, critical care provides an essential enabling and underpinning service, without which a hospital would be unable to conduct most or all of its planned and unplanned activity. The resources that go into a critical care bed, should therefore be valued against the activities and care throughout the hospital, that the availability of that bed allows to happen.