ICU epitomizes the critical sections of the hospital where the sickest patients are cared for. The physicians and staff in the ICU have specialized training to allow them to care for the sickest patients. By virtue of the type of patient that is cared for in the ICU, there are drugs used only and highly sophisticated pieces of equipment that are more likely to be found in the ICU. The majority ...

BACKGROUND: In order to identify relevant targets for change, it is essential to know the reliability of incident staff reporting. The aim of this study is to compare the incidence and type of unintended events (UE) reported by facilitated Intensive Care Unit (ICU) staff with those recorded concurrently by an observer. METHODS: The study is a prospective data collection performed in two 4-bed m...

Effective management of device-supported patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is complex, involving the interpretation of large volumes of high frequency data from numerous cardiac and respiratory parameters presented by the ICU monitors. ICU Clinical Decision Support systems can play an important role in assisting medical staff in terms of its ability to disentangle and comprehend large a...

BACKGROUND Teamwork-that is, collaboration and communication-is an important factor for safe healthcare, but professions perceive the quality of teamwork differently. OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between simulation-based team training (SBTT) and different professions' self-efficacy, experienced quality of collaboration and communication, perceptions of teamwork and safety, together w...

PURPOSE To evaluate the impact of a redesigned intensive care unit (ICU) nursing discharge process on ICU discharge delay, hospital mortality, and ICU readmission within 72 hours. METHODS A quality improvement study using a time series design and statistical process control analysis was conducted in one Australian general ICU. The primary outcome measure was hours of discharge delay per patie...

The proliferation of alarms on equipment in ICUs contributes to a level of noise that can disturb both patient and staff. To determine whether these alarms are identifiable by sound alone to our ICU staff, we recorded 33 audio signals commonly heard on the ward, 10 of which we defined as critical alarms. One hundred subjects (25 physicians, 41 nurses, and 34 respiratory therapists) listened ind...

BACKGROUND Short-term deployment of nurses is usually used within the hospital units in order to 'balance the numbers' or to cover the shortage of staff in the different units. Often nurses in the intensive care unit (ICU) are sent to go and assist in other units, where there is not enough nursing staff or when their own unit is not busy. OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to explore ...