Crit Care Resusc
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Comparative Study
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients requiring critical care: characteristics, resource use, and outcomes.
To provide a contemporary description of the demographics, characteristics and outcomes of critically ill Indigenous patients in Australia. ⋯ Indigenous patients, especially young Indigenous patients, were disproportionately represented in Australian ICUs, particularly for sepsis. The high level of acute illness and high proportion of emergency admissions could be interpreted as representing delayed presentation, which, with a higher re-admission rate, suggest access barriers to health care may exist. Nevertheless, there was no mortality gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians during a hospital admission for critical illness.