Intensive care unit

[3] With this work, the mortality rate decreased from 60% to 42% and then to 2.2%[4][5] In response to a polio epidemic (where many patients required constant ventilation and surveillance), Bjørn Aage Ibsen established the first intensive care unit globally in Copenhagen in 1953.

In 1955, William Mosenthal, a surgeon at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center also opened an early intensive care unit.

The patient may require multiple machines; Examples: continuous dialysis CRRT, a intra-aortic balloon pump, ECMO.

International guidelines recommend that every patient gets checked for delirium every day (usually twice or as much required) using a validated clinical tool.

The two most widely used are the Confusion Assessment Method for the ICU (CAM-ICU) and the Intensive Care Delirium Screening Checklist (ICDSC).

This high disparity is attributed to admission of patients in the UK only when considered the most severely ill.[14] Intensive care is an expensive healthcare service.

[15] In the United Kingdom in 2003–04, the average cost of funding an intensive care unit was:[16] Some hospitals have installed teleconferencing systems that allow doctors and nurses at a central facility (either in the same building, at a central location serving several local hospitals, or in rural locations another more urban facility) to collaborate with on-site staff and speak with patients (a form of [telemedicine]).