background: today, nurses are exposed to everchanging complicated conditions in health care services, they provide. to be able to cope with these conditions effectively, they should be competent decision makers. besides, as decision making conditions get more complicated, using critical thinking is a need. the current study was carried out to evaluate the relationship between critical thinking ...

background: magnesium (mg) is a necessary element in a vast number of enzymatic paths throughout the body, so, its cellular mechanisms affect clinical outcome; it is also the main second intracellular cation playing a crucial role in atp/adp energy conversion. lack of mg is usually reported in 10% of hospitalized patients worldwide. chronic hypomagnesaemia is also in correlation with many chron...

abstract background: clinical guidelines are important instruments for increasing the quality of clinical practice in the treatment team. compilation of clinical guidelines is important due to special condition of the neonates and the nurses facing critical conditions in the neonatal intensive care unit (nicu). with 98% of neonatal deaths occurring in nicus in the hospitals, it is important to ...

OBJECTIVES To describe the patient demographics, outcomes and trends of admissions with acute severe asthma admitted to adult critical care units in England and Wales. DESIGN 10-year, retrospective analysis of a national audit database. SETTING Secondary care: adult, general critical care units in the UK. PARTICIPANTS 830 808 admissions to adult, general critical care units. PRIMARY AND...

Consensus guidelines on providing optimal end-of-life care in the intensive care unit (ICU) are important tools. However, despite 30 years of ethical discourse and consensus on many of the principles that guide end-of-life care in the ICU, care remains inadequate. Although consensus on the most challenging ethical aspects of some cases will remain elusive, this need not deter clinicians from en...

background: peripartum cardiomyopathy (ppcm) is an uncommon disease that affects women in the last month of pregnancy or within the first five months postpartum, occurring in about 1 in 3500 live births. the disease bears potentially devastating effects both on mother and the fetus if not treated early in its course. case presentation: the case was a 34-year old woman with a triple pregnancy wh...

Objectives: Neuro-critical Intensive Care Units (NICUs) have functioned to deliver intensive medical care services for patients with acute neurology problems. However, physicians and ICU staff do not have any feedback about their patients and their abilities after successful discharge. Various studies have documented short-term survival in ICUs, but the long-term outcome and quality of life (...

1 Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand 2 Intensive Care Unit, Wellington Regional Hospital, Wellington, New Zealand 3 Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia 4 Department of Intensive Care Medicine, Christchurch Hospital, Christchurch, New Zealand 5 Department of Critical Care Medicine, Auckland City H...

background critical-care patients are at higher risk of untreated pain, because they are often unable to communicate owing to altered mental status, tracheal intubation and sedation. objectives this study compared two pain assessment tools on tracheal intubated critically ill patients in a cardiac post-anesthesia care unit, who were unable to communicate verbally. the studied tools were “critic...