Main description:

The origin of modern intensive care units (ICUs) has frequently been attributed to the widespread provision of mechanical ventilation within dedicated hospital areas during the 1952 Copenhagen polio epidemic. However, modern ICUs have developed to treat or monitor patients who have any severe, life-threatening disease or injury. These patients receive specialized care and vital organ assistance such as mechanical ventilation, cardiovascular support, or hemodialysis. ICU patients now typically occupy approximately 10% of inpatient acute care beds, yet the structure and organization of these ICUs can be quite different across hospitals. In The Organization of Critical Care: An Evidence-Based Approach to Improving Quality, leaders provide a concise, evidence-based review of ICU organizational factors that have been associated with improved patient (or other) outcomes. The topics covered are grouped according to four broad domains: (1) the organization, structure, and staffing of an ICU; (2) organizational approaches to improving quality of care in an ICU; (3) integrating ICU care with other healthcare provided within the hospital and across the broader healthcare system; and (4) international perspectives on critical care delivery. Each chapter summarizes a different aspect of ICU organization and targets individual clinicians and healthcare decision makers. A long overdue contribution to the field, The Organization of Critical Care: An Evidence-Based Approach to Improving Quality is an indispensable guide for all clinicians and health administrators concerned with achieving state-of-the-art outcomes for intensive care.

Contents:

I - Organizing Intensive Care

Ch.1: Organizational Change in Critical Care: The Next Magic Bullet?

Gordon D. Rubenfeld, Damon C. Scales

Ch.2: Origins of the Critically iIll: The Impetus for Critical Care Medicine

Matthew Rosengart, Michael R. Pinsky

Ch.3: Intensivist and Alternative Models of ICU Staffing

Hayley B. Gershengorn, Allan Garland

Ch.4: Health Professionals in Critical Care

Timothy G. Buchman

Ch.5: Computers in Intensive Care

Stephen E. Lapinsky

Ch.6: Integrating Subspecialty Expertise in the Intensive Care Unit

Jason Katz

II - Improving Intensive Care

Ch.7: Quality Improvement in the Intensive Care Unit

Christopher Dale, J. Randall Curtis

Ch.8: Facilitating Interactions between Healthcare Providers in the ICU

Andre Carlos Kajdacsy-Balla Amaral

Ch.9: Teamwork and Leadership in the Critical Care Unit

Tom W Reader, Brian H Cuthbertson

Ch. 10: Caring for ICU Providers

Ruth M. Kleinpell, Omar B. Lateef, Gourang P. Patel

III - Integrating Intensive Care

Ch. 11: Rationing without Contemplation: Why Attention to Patient Flow is Important and How to Make it Better

Michael Howell, Jennifer Stevens

Ch. 12: Rapid Response Systems

Ken Hillman, Jack Chen

Ch. 13: The Chronically Critically Ill

Shannon S. Carson, Kathleen Dalton

Ch. 14: Regionalization of Critical Care

Theodore J. Iwashyna, Jeremy M. Kahn

Ch. 15: International Perspectives on Critical Care

Hannah Wunsch

Ch. 16: Critical Care in Low-Resource Settings

Srinivas Murthy, Sadat A. Sayeed, Neil Adhikari

IV - Critical Care - Global and Future Perspectives

Ch. 17: Disaster Planning for the Intensive Care Unit: A Critical Framework

Daniel B. Jamieson, Lee Daugherty Biddison