Critical care - where have we been and where are we going?

By Jean-Louis Vincent. 2013

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The first ICUs were established in the late 1950s and the specialty of critical care medicine began to develop. Since those early days, huge improvements have been made in terms of technological advances and understanding of the pathophysiology and pathogenesis of the disease processes that affect critically ill patients. Progress in therapeutics has been less dramatic, but process of care has improved steadily with important changes, including less iatrogenicity, better communication with patients and families, and improved teamwork, which have helped improve outcomes for ICU patients. Critical care medicine is one of the fastest-growing hospital specialties and, looking back, it is clear just how far we have come in such a relatively short period of time. With the ICU set to occupy an increasingly important place in hospitals worldwide, we must learn from the past and wisely embrace new developments in technology, therapeutics, and process, to ensure that the goals of critical care medicine are met in the future.

Subfields: Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine, Epidemiology, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

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Citations in the corpus

Reinforcement Learning in Healthcare: A Survey (2019, background): “lly, such patients are provided with separate geographical area, or formally named the intensive care unit (ICU), for intensive monitoring and close attention, so as to improve the treatment outcomes [188]. ICUs will play a major role in the new era of healthcare systems. It is estimated that the ra”
State of the art review: the data revolution in critical care (2015, background): “The increasing need for intensive care has spiked the ratio of ICU beds to hospital beds as the ICU plays an expanding role in acute hospital care [3].”
Machine Learning and Decision Support in Critical Care (2016, background): “ICUs have evolved from the notion that specialized units used for close monitoring and treatment of patients could improve outcomes; many predecessors of the modern ICU were established in the late 1950s to provide respiratory support during a polio epidemic [1].”