Articles: intensive-care-units.
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Our objective is to determine the opinions and knowledge of intensive care unit physicians toward organ donation. All physicians working in all 13 hospitals of Curitiba with intensive care unit for adults participated of the study. Of a total of 81 physicians, 75 (92.6%) answered the questionnaire. ⋯ Most physicians did not know the patient survival after transplantation of several organs. It is concluded that almost all intensive care unit physicians in Curitiba are favorable to organ donation and are willing to participate actively in obtaining consent of family members for donation. The basic knowledge of Brazilian law and several medical subjects on organ transplantation is unsatisfactory.
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Bed chest X-rays carried out in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) are an important means of patient monitoring. To get the starting points for standardization of the documentation of X-ray findings, we examined course and contents of the daily X-ray conference in an ICU. We video-taped the conferences and registered its vocabulary. ⋯ Sorting and viewing the X-rays took 60 s. Main disruptions were related to non-availability of X-rays and clinical patient data. Clinical information reported during the discussion is rarely mentioned in the dictated findings.
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Critical care medicine · Jan 1994
Comparative StudyInfluence of nosocomial infection on mortality rate in an intensive care unit.
To assess the impact of nosocomial infection on the mortality rate in an intensive care unit (ICU). ⋯ Nosocomial infection increases the risk of death. The effect is stronger in younger and less severely ill patients.
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There are now two validated time points for predicting hospital mortality of ICU patients--at admission and at 24 hours. The best purposes include evaluation of high clinical performance ICUs and for patients being enrolled in clinical trials. For the latter purpose, the model must be calibrated in the individual hospital to ensure that the model is applicable. ⋯ The mathematical link between physiology score and estimation of hospital mortality is established only for the time point of 24 hours after ICU admission. Calibration and discrimination of the admission and 24-hour models also must be performed within each hospital in which individual probabilities are presented to families. It may be possible to customize a probability model such as MPM to achieve a high level of calibration at the individual hospital level.
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Critical care clinics · Jan 1994
Multicenter Study Comparative StudyThe case against using the APACHE system to predict intensive care unit outcome in trauma patients.
The use of outcome indices as a means of evaluating institutional performance for delivery of medical care is at the forefront of federal health policy reforms. Because an enormous number of clinical and financial data are generated by ICU patients, it is inevitable that integrated bedside computers will be necessary to supply the type of information that is being sought by governmental and private insurance agencies involved in assessment of hospital performance. The Health Care Financing Administration already has adopted the APACHE data collection protocols and predictive models for the severity of illness adjustments that were used in assessing the 1986 hospital-specific death rate for acute myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, stroke, and pneumonia. ⋯ The inequities for certain subgroups of patients, including trauma patients, could create situations in which care is rationed rather than allocated according to a plan that distributes resources efficiently. The APACHE system has several shortcomings and adds little, if anything, to the potential solutions for trauma quality assurance and resource allocation. Nor has the APACHE system established procedures for documenting institutional review of unexpected trauma deaths that would be equivalent, for example, to the type of audit filters applied by the American College of Surgeons in conjunction with the TRISS methodology.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)