Intensive Care Unit Icu Quotes

The hospital will never be healthy for patients if it's not a healthy environment for nurses, where their voices are heard and where they can care for their patients and use the full extent of their knowledge, abilities, and skills. After all, hospitals today have become one big intensive care unit: all patients need intensive caring.

Many marriages would have been laid to rest a long time ago, if they were not on a life-support machine called other people’s opinions and/or expectations.

Impatience often makes us patients.

The nurse smiled and gestured to two cameras pointing at each patient—one to monitor the patient himself, the other to observe the charts. The nurse told us that these were fed by Skype directly into the intensive care unit in one of the hospitals in Washington, DC, where there was a Syrian-American ICU specialist looking at the monitors twenty-four hours a day, and adjusting the patient’s medication and ventilation based on the clinical parameters.

Whoever invented the ICU should see some of the patients we have here. With reference to the atom bomb, Einstein said, “With the development of the bomb, everything has changed save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift perilously.” I propose with the invention of the ICU we also need to change our way of thinking. Just because we have the capacity to prolong life in elderly people doesn’t mean we have to and yet we do; every day in this place we prolong suffering at little benefit. Bring back the house call and a hold of the hand.

intensive care units (ICUs) are physiologically fragile and unstable, generally have life-threatening conditions, and require close monitoring and rapid therapeutic interventions. They are connected to an array of equipment and monitors, and are carefully attended by the clinical staff. Staggering amounts of data are collected daily on each patient in an ICU: multi-channel waveform data sampled hundreds of times each second, vital sign time series updated each second or minute, alarms and alerts, lab results, imaging results, records of medication and fluid administration, staff notes and more.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal. Line infections are so common that they are considered a routine complication. ICUs put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that after ten days 4 percent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States and are fatal between 5 and 28 percent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care. And this is just one of many risks. After ten days with a urinary catheter, 4 percent of American ICU patients develop a bladder infection. After ten days on a ventilator, 6 percent develop bacterial pneumonia, resulting in death 40 to 45 percent of the time. All in all, about half of ICU patients end up experiencing a serious complication, and once that occurs the chances of survival drop sharply.

Some time way back in the latter half of my internship, I gave up the idea of saving lives and became more comfortable with the idea of managing illness to limit dis-ease. But in the ICU we really aren’t even able to do that very much since almost all the definitive maneuvers have already been made or are not any longer an option. As a result, what we do for ourselves and what we do for patients are really two distinct things. For ourselves we manage to learn a great deal about the mechanics of medical care for desperately sick people. For patients and, more importantly, for families, I’m beginning to think what we do is simply provide a dramatic, even gruesome ritual of dying.

I often struggle to breathe but resist thinking of the lost faith in the judicial system, incompetent politicians, and military dictators who worked hard to wheel me off into the intensive care unit (ICU) by placing my future on a ventilator. Now, my life support is a drip feed of foreign loans and emergency cash injections from lenders and friends. Have I told you my name? My name is Pakistan.

On any given day in the United States alone, some ninety thousand people are admitted to intensive care. Over a year, an estimated five million Americans will be, and over a normal lifetime nearly all of us will come to know the glassed bay of an ICU from the inside. Wide swaths of medicine now depend on the life support systems that ICUs provide: care for premature infants; for victims of trauma, strokes, and heart attacks; for patients who have had surgery on their brains, hearts, lungs, or major blood vessels. Critical care has become an increasingly large portion of what hospitals do. Fifty years ago, ICUs barely existed. Now, to take a recent random day in my hospital, 155 of our almost 700 patients are in intensive care. The average stay of an ICU patient is four days, and the survival rate is 86 percent. Going into an ICU, being put on a mechanical ventilator, having tubes and wires run into and out of you, is not a sentence of death. But the days will be the most precarious of your life.