Not only intensive care, but also an intense experience for those affected and their relatives: as frightening as the apparatus may seem and as disturbing as the constant hustle and bustle can be, the monitoring and therapy in the intensive care unit are vital for the patient’s survival. Find out here when a stay in an intensive care unit is necessary, what it’s like in such a unit and what relatives of intensive care patients should also know.
Intensive care unit enables intensive treatment
“He is now in intensive care” – for most who hear such a sentence, fears, unpleasant feelings or flight reflexes are awakened. Understandable – after all, a stay there is only necessary in the case of a strong (physical) state of emergency and is therefore linked for our sensibilities with the threat of death and inevitable illness.
But as terrible as the situation there may seem, it is first and foremost one thing: the opportunity to stabilize and thus improve the perhaps life-threatening condition of a patient by means of intensive monitoring, care and therapy. The intensive care unit in the hospital helps to avert illness and, in the worst case, death.
When is a stay in an intensive care unit necessary?
Admission to the intensive care unit (ICU from the English term “intensive care unit”) is indicated when a patient requires particularly intensive monitoring and treatment. Possible reasons include:
- An acute emergency
- Be a chronic condition that is acutely exacerbated (for example, a pulmonary embolism or a severe asthma attack)
- An extensive injury, for example, after a car accident (polytrauma).
- The first hours to days after surgery
- Certain therapies that may be associated with serious complications (for example, dissolving blood clots)
Patients who require ventilation are also cared for in the intensive care unit.
Is there only one intensive care unit?
In smaller hospitals, there is usually one interdisciplinary ward where all intensive care patients are located. In larger or specialty hospitals, there are often several specific ICUs or at least several functional units in one ward-for example:
- The CCU (Cardiac Care Unit) for patients with acute cardiac problems.
- The Stroke Unit for patients with a stroke or
- Intensive care units for surgical patients who continue to be cared for there after an operation
Increasingly, there are also “intermediate care units” (IMC), which lie between ICUs and normal wards in terms of equipment and intensity of care, and in which patients requiring intensive care who are not quite as seriously ill are cared for.
