Articles: intensive-care-units.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Critical care unit noise and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
To determine if Critical Care Unit (CCU) sound levels suppress rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. ⋯ Although generalization of the results to CCU patients is limited (because of the use of laboratory subjects), the results provided convincing support for a causal relationship between CCU sound levels and suppression of REM sleep.
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Critical care medicine · May 1993
Verification of the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation scoring system in a Hong Kong intensive care unit.
To validate the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE II) severity of illness scoring system in Chinese patients in a multidisciplinary intensive care unit (ICU) in Hong Kong. To audit the service and utilization of an ICU with a low ICU to hospital bed ratio. ⋯ The APACHE II scoring system was an accurate predictor of group outcome in a Chinese population, making it suitable for comparisons between countries. Application of the APACHE II scoring system in a clinical audit facilitates critical appraisal of an ICU service. Problems identified by the study were a shortage of ICU beds and delayed referrals of patients.
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Int J Clin Monit Comput · May 1993
A knowledge-based alarm system for monitoring cardiac operated patients--technical construction and evaluation.
A knowledge-based alarm system for intensive care monitoring was designed, built, tested on-line, and evaluated. The system is a functional prototype of a highly specific patient monitor providing alarms on hypovolemia, hyperdynamic state, left ventricular failure and hypoventilation. ⋯ The alarm system has an electronic access to data available in a multichannel patient monitor and the patient data management system of the intensive care unit. Median filtering, trend estimation, and rule-based reasoning are applied when processing the measured variables and estimating the patient's state.
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Anasthesiol Intensivmed Notfallmed Schmerzther · Apr 1993
[Dying and death in a surgical intensive care unit from the viewpoint of close relatives--a questionnaire survey].
No studies are available so far on the way dying and death in the ICU are perceived by relatives of the patients. It is also not clear in how far the current criticism of intensive care medicine stems from these relatives. These problems were investigated by sending a self-developed 48-item questionnaire to relatives of patients who had died in the ICU. ⋯ However, the treatment was not perceived as an artificial prolongation of life. Although death loses dignity in the ICU according to those questioned, dying in peace does seem possible in this situation. The high response rate, the positive general assessment and the critical view of death in the ICU are discussed in the following.