ICU
I can promise you that you do not want to be a patient in my unit. If you are then that means you’re really sick. But I can also promise you that if you end up here you will get stellar care - Brie Gowen
image by: Calleamanecer
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A Letter to the Doctors and Nurses Who Cared for My Wife
After his 34-year-old wife suffered a devastating asthma attack and later died, the Boston writer Peter DeMarco wrote the following letter to the intensive care unit staff of CHA Cambridge Hospital who cared for her and helped him cope.
As I begin to tell my friends and family about the seven days you treated my wife, Laura Levis, in what turned out to be the last days of her young life, they stop me at about the 15th name that I recall. The list includes the doctors, nurses, respiratory specialists, social workers, even cleaning staff members who cared for her.
“How do you remember any of their names?” they ask. How could I not, I respond.
Every single one of…
Resources
A Letter to the Family of My ICU Patient
Working in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is an experience that can’t quite be put into words. It’s fast-paced, intense, and the stress of some situations can even occasionally make my own heart rate go up as high as one of our trauma patients. Some people love us. Some people hate us. I can promise you that you do not want to be a patient in my unit. If you are then that means you’re really sick.
After the ICU: What Does It Mean to Be 'Okay'?
Patients who require intensive hospital care often go home with serious mental and emotional scars that go unaddressed. The ICU can be a microcosm of a healthcare system's inability to see bigger pictures for life after illness.
Escaping ICU Hell
Late-life care is arguably the most flawed precinct of a troubled medical system. It is also a sector that growing numbers of Americans will encounter, as more of us live longer. Longevity, of course, is good. But for how many of us will it mean additional years of sickness, frailty, decline? For how many will it mean more medical care than we need or want?
Hospital ICUs Mine Big Data in Push for Better Outcomes
Researchers look for clues in the wealth of information from past cases.
Hospitals Take On Post-ICU Syndrome, Helping Patients Recover
Now, many hospitals are starting to modify standard ICU practices, such as giving patients breaks from constant ventilation, avoiding over-sedation, monitoring them closely for signs of delirium and getting them out of bed to walk as soon as feasible. They are adopting protocols to treat sepsis aggressively.
ICUs Ease Restrictions on Visitors
Some hospitals are bucking tradition by allowing family and friends of intensive-care patients to visit whenever they want.
Intensive Care Gets Friendlier with Apps, Devices
Hospitals are redesigning intensive care units to make them safer and less dehumanizing, with a new focus on engaging families and patients in decisions.
Talking Death and Existential Anxiety with an ICU Nurse
I asked my friend Ernesto, who works as an ICU nurse, some questions about existential anxiety, fear of death, and how surrounding oneself with the dying can affect one's brain.
The Alarming Rate of Errors in the ICU
Missed diagnoses may be present in more than a quarter of patients who die in hospital intensive care units, and they may result in the deaths of more people each year than breast cancer.
The Doctor Is In, but Hundreds of Miles Away
More than a decade ago, this kind of tele-ICU command center was trumpeted by its creators as the new standard in critical care, a way to save lives and money by stretching the skills of an inadequate pool of intensivists to help oversee more of the country’s sickest patients. Today, with the growth of such systems stalled at about 10 percent of ICU patients nationwide, and wildly contradictory studies about the results, no one can say with authority if, or under what circumstances, tele-ICUs deliver on their promises.
The I.C.U. Is Not a Pause Button
When I first realized that in intensive care we held lives in limbo more often than we saved lives, I asked a friend who was a more experienced nurse how she felt about that. She said that sometimes a stay in the I.C.U. lets a patient’s family prepare for his death. But while it may soften the shock of death for the family, being in the I.C.U. is unpleasant and bizarre for the patient.
The Wearable ICU: Replacing The Cables And Wires
But thanks to newly developed high-speed wireless technology from a team of scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it may soon be possible to monitor vital signs remotely using a wearable patch equipped with stretchy circuits.
A Death in the I.C.U.
It’s a message that I continue to hear: Dying in an I.C.U. is a bad death that occurs when communication and understanding break down, while dying at home is a success. There is some truth to this. I have seen many men and women, bald and withered and suffering, tethered to machines that serve only to prolong an end that is inevitable.
Disabled Elderly Decline Sharply after ICU Stay
Seniors admitted to the hospital intensive care unit were more likely to die or sharply decline soon after their release depending on how well they functioned beforehand, according to a new study.
Life, Death and Money in the ICU
As a nation, we spend half of our health care dollars during the last six months of a patient's life, a time when many patients wind up in the ICU. If we are ever to control rising health costs, we will have to do a better job confronting the realities for patients...
Promoting Staff Resilience in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit
Health care professionals experience workplace stress, which may lead to impaired physical and mental health, job turnover, and burnout. Resilience allows people to handle stress positively. Little research is aimed at finding interventions to improve resilience in health care professionals.
Sleep Could Ease Delirium In ICU Patients, Study Finds
Taking steps to ensure the hospital’s sickest patients get a good night’s rest could help eliminate a common roadblock to their recovery, according to a new study.
‘A Swimming Pool in the ICU?’
The ICU team’s bold yet careful response to Bennie’s unusual request taught me an enduring lesson regarding sympathy versus empathy.
A Letter to the Doctors and Nurses Who Cared for My Wife
After his 34-year-old wife suffered a devastating asthma attack and later died, the Boston writer Peter DeMarco wrote the following letter to the intensive care unit staff of CHA Cambridge Hospital who cared for her and helped him cope.
Pricey Technology Is Keeping People Alive Who Don’t Want to Live
The human suffering brought about by this default use of technology is clear, and the fiscal cost to society is impossible to ignore.
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