Critical Care Medicine: Opportunities and Strategies for Improvement

Do we need intermediate care units?

“…Increasingly sick patient populations, improved life-support systems, newer, more effective therapeutic agents, and greater understanding of the pathophysiology of many disease processes have led to a growing need for ICU beds, with the ICU increasingly accounting for a larger and larger proportion of the hospital budget [1]. Intensive care is unquestionably expensive care [2,3] and resources are not always readily available.…”

Ventilatory care in a selection of ontario hospitals: bigger is not necessarily better!

“…To determine a potential for improvement, we compare our performance with that of others to identify those factors that drive superior performance. Once this is completed and factors identified, we can combine this new knowledge with information in the literature to develop evidence-based clinical practice guidelines [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Finally, these guidelines are implemented, using strategies to optimize compliance, and evaluated to determine their impact on both practice and patient outcome.…”