Critical care : the official journal of the Critical Care Forum
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Communication failures are a significant contributor to medical errors that harm patients. Critical care delivery is a complex system of inter-professional work that is distributed across time, space, and multiple disciplines. Because health-care education and delivery remain siloed by profession, we lack a shared framework within which we discuss and subsequently optimize patient care. ⋯ We suggest that the 'phases-of-illness paradigm' will facilitate communication about critically ill patients and create a shared mental model for interdisciplinary patient care. In so doing, this paradigm may reduce communication errors, complications, and costs while improving resource utilization and trainee education. Additional research applications are feasible.
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As your hospital's ICU director, you are approached by the hospital's administration to help solve ongoing problems with ICU bed availability. The ICU seems to be constantly full, and trauma patients in the emergency department sometimes wait up to 24 hours before receiving a bed. Additionally, the cardiac surgeons were forced to cancel several elective coronary-artery bypass graft cases because there was not a bed available for postoperative recovery. The hospital administrators ask whether you can decrease your ICU length of stay, and wonder whether they should expand the ICU to include more beds For help in understanding and optimizing your ICU's throughput, you seek out the operations management researchers at your university.
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Severe sepsis is a major challenge for clinicians caring for acutely ill patients. For many years, several biomarkers have been tested and proposed to improve the ability not only to diagnose but also to anticipate clinical response to antibiotics. Despite the availability of many sophisticated and novel biomarkers, current evidence demonstrates that C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-known and relatively inexpensive biomarker, is useful in the clinical setting. The sequential evaluation of plasma CRP concentrations in patients with severe sepsis and the interpretation of its patterns may allow assessments of individual prognosis and response to treatment.
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Low tidal volume (VT 6 ml/predicted body weight) pressure limited (plateau pressure <30 cmH2O) protective ventilation as proposed by the ARDS Network was associated with an improvement in mortality and is considered the gold standard for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) ventilation strategies. Limiting plateau pressure minimizes ventilator-induced lung injury by reducing the trans-pulmonary pressure, which is the real alveolar distending pressure. ⋯ Moreover, low tidal volume to keep plateau pressure <30 cmH2O could be associated with large differences compared to measured total lung capacity. Quantitative bedside techniques that are able to measure lung volumes together with trans-pulmonary pressure could expand our chances to tailor mechanical ventilation in ARDS patients.
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Shock therapy aims at increasing central venous oxygen saturation (ScvO2), which is a marker of inadequate oxygen delivery. In this issue of Critical Care, Textoris and colleagues challenge this notion by reporting that high levels of ScvO2 are associated with mortality in patients with septic shock. This is of obvious interest, but as their retrospective design has inherent limitations, the association should be confirmed in a prospective, multicenter study with protocolized ScvO2 measurements and detailed registration of potentially confounding factors.