OBJECTIVES To explore staff perceptions of the impact of 'modernization' on the organization, delivery and culture of adult critical care services in England. 'Modernization' policies aimed to alter the boundaries around critical care and create a comprehensive, seamless service. METHODS Seven hospitals (three teaching and four district general hospitals) in three critical care networks parti...

BACKGROUND Although information technology adequately supports clinical care in many intensive care units (ICUs), it provides much poorer support for the managerial information needed to coordinate multi-professional care. To gain a general view of the most crucial multi-professional information needs of ICU shift leaders a national survey was conducted, focusing on the information needs of cha...

Intensive Care Unit (ICU) monitors generate large volumes of high frequency data from numerous cardiac and respiratory sensors attached to a patient. This presents information overload to medical staff who need to interpret this data to evaluate the physiological status of the patient at any particular point in time. In this paper we present a machine learning technique called random selection ...

Agitation is a significant problem in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), affecting 71% of sedated adult patients during 58% of ICU patient-days. Subjective scale based assessment-methods focused primarily on assessing excessive patient motion are currently used to assess the level of patient agitation, but are limited in their accuracy and resolution. This research quantifies this approach by devel...

OBJECTIVES The objectives of this study were to develop a scale for measuring the highest level of mobility in adult ICU patients and to assess its feasibility and inter-rater reliability. BACKGROUND Growing evidence supports the feasibility, safety and efficacy of early mobilization in the intensive care unit (ICU). However, there are no adequately validated tools to quickly, easily, and rel...

The importance of computer aided decision making is continuously increasing. In the ICU, medical decision support services gather and process medical data of patients and present results and suggestions to the medical staff. The medical decision support services can monitor for example blood pressure, creatinine levels or the usage of antibiotics. If certain levels are crossed, they raise alert...

Background. Organizing and performing patient transfers in the continuum of care is part of the work of nurses and other staff of a multiprofessional healthcare team. An understanding of discharge practices is needed in order to ultimate patients' transfers from high technological intensive care units (ICU) to general wards. Aim. To describe, as experienced by intensive care and general ward st...

The purpose of this study was to determine the number of weekly acquisitions permissible using a mobile PET/SPECT scanner for myocardial perfusion/viability imaging in an intensive care unit (ICU) based on the effective dose to patients and staff. The effective dose to other patients and staff in an ICU was calculated following recommendations from the American Association of Physicists in Medi...

Objective: Expert surveillance of healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) is a key parameter for good clinical practice, especially in intensive care medicine. Assessment of clinical entities such as HCAIs is a time-consuming task for highly trained experts. Such are neither available nor affordable in sufficient numbers for continuous surveillance services. Intelligent information technology ...