Articles Tagged With: ICU
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Post-COVID-19: The Crisis After the Crisis
Critical care physicians have the opportunity to optimize long-term function and quality of life for COVID-19 survivors. It is paramount to prevent, recognize, and treat post-COVID-19 symptoms.
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CMS Report Confirms Need for CRNAs
Tens of thousands of nurse anesthetists helped care for critically ill patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, making certified registered nurse anesthetists among the top specialties that served Medicare patients in non-telehealth during the first few months of the pandemic.
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Routine Ethics Consults Helpful if ECMO Is Considered
When a patient is placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), usually emergently, families have begun to face the gravity of the situation. Suddenly, ECMO offers new hope. Even though the primary team explains ECMO will be a time-limited trial and a bridge to recovery, transplant, or device, many families remain focused only on the possibility of hope.
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Quality of Life Important to ICU Patients, But Clinicians Lack Data
This underscores how clinicians must start keeping track of these outcomes to improve their ability to predict them and provide patients and families with information they want.
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Video Facilitates Informed Consent for ICU Procedures
Audiovisual modules may improve knowledge and comprehension of ICU procedures, according to the results of a study of critically ill surgical patients and their legally authorized representatives.
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Report Links ED Boarding to Worse Clinical Outcomes
Some hospitals have found a novel solution in the form of resuscitative care units, which are ICUs based in EDs. Patients who need time-sensitive respiratory, metabolic, neurologic, or hemodynamic critical care can receive it in the ED. This prevents these patients from waiting so long for a bed to finally open in the appropriate specialty ICU.
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Improved ICU Physician Staffing Leads to Better Safety Grade
When Doylestown Hospital in Pennsylvania received a C on the Spring 2016 Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade, leaders launched a campaign to improve patient safety. A central tactic was adapting its staffing model to meet Leapfrog’s ICU Physician Staffing criteria.
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Do Not Intubate Orders Becoming More Common
Rates increased over time, from about one in 10 patients 20 years ago to about one in three patients in the past five years. The exact reasons for this increase remain unclear.
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Conflicts Over Decision-Making Frequent in ICUs
Consider psychological, biological, spiritual, and social factors, and the role they play in understanding illness and healthcare delivery. Using this model, clinical ethicists can encourage dialogue between healthcare professionals caring for seriously ill patients.
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Growing Movement Toward More Family Participation in ICUs
Family satisfaction scores increased after ICUs implemented family-centered care initiatives as part of the Society of Critical Care Medicine’s Family Engagement Collaborative.