Intensive care medicine, also called critical care medicine, is a medical specialty that deals with seriously or critically ill patients who have, are at risk of, or are recovering from conditions that may be life-threatening. It includes providing life support, invasive monitoring techniques, resuscitation, and end-of-life care. Doctors in this specialty are often called intensive care physicians, critical care physicians, or intensivists.
A hospital-acquired infection, also known as a nosocomial infection, is an infection that is acquired in a hospital or other healthcare facility. To emphasize both hospital and nonhospital settings, it is sometimes instead called a healthcare-associated infection. Such an infection can be acquired in hospital, nursing home, rehabilitation facility, outpatient clinic, diagnostic laboratory or other clinical settings. A number of dynamic processes can bring contamination into operating rooms and other areas within nosocomial settings. Infection is spread to the susceptible patient in the clinical setting by various means. Healthcare staff also spread infection, in addition to contaminated equipment, bed linens, or air droplets. The infection can originate from the outside environment, another infected patient, staff that may be infected, or in some cases, the source of the infection cannot be determined. In some cases the microorganism originates from the patient's own skin microbiota, becoming opportunistic after surgery or other procedures that compromise the protective skin barrier. Though the patient may have contracted the infection from their own skin, the infection is still considered nosocomial since it develops in the health care setting. Nosocomial infection tends to lack evidence that it was present when the patient entered the healthcare setting, thus meaning it was acquired post-admission.
University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center (UH Cleveland Medical Center) is a large not-for-profit academic medical complex in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center is an affiliate hospital of Case Western Reserve University.
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHUSOM) is the medical school of Johns Hopkins University, a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1893, the School of Medicine shares a campus with Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Children's Center, established in 1889.
A coronary care unit (CCU) or cardiac intensive care unit (CICU) is a hospital ward specialized in the care of patients with heart attacks, unstable angina, cardiac dysrhythmia and various other cardiac conditions that require continuous monitoring and treatment.
Patient safety is a discipline that emphasizes safety in health care through the prevention, reduction, reporting and analysis of error and other types of unnecessary harm that often lead to adverse patient events. The frequency and magnitude of avoidable adverse events, often known as patient safety incidents, experienced by patients was not well known until the 1990s, when multiple countries reported significant numbers of patients harmed and killed by medical errors. Recognizing that healthcare errors impact 1 in every 10 patients around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) calls patient safety an endemic concern. Indeed, patient safety has emerged as a distinct healthcare discipline supported by an immature yet developing scientific framework. There is a significant transdisciplinary body of theoretical and research literature that informs the science of patient safety with mobile health apps being a growing area of research.
A Patient Safety Organization (PSO) is a group, institution, or association that improves medical care by reducing medical errors. Common functions of patient safety organizations are data collection, analysis, reporting, education, funding, and advocacy. A PSO differs from a Federally designed Patient Safety Organization (PSO), which provides health care providers in the U.S. privilege and confidentiality protections for efforts to improve patient safety and the quality of patient care delivery
An intensivist, also known as a critical care doctor, is a medical practitioner who specializes in the care of critically ill patients, most often in the intensive care unit (ICU). Intensivists can be internists or internal medicine sub-specialists, anaesthesiologists, emergency medicine physicians, paediatricians, or surgeons who have completed a fellowship in critical care medicine. The intensivist must be competent not only in a broad spectrum of conditions among critically ill patients but also with the technical procedures and equipment used in the intensive care setting such as airway management, rapid sequence induction of anaesthesia, maintenance and weaning of sedation, central venous and arterial catheterisation, renal replacement therapy and management of mechanical ventilators.
An intensive care unit (ICU), also known as an intensive therapy unit or intensive treatment unit (ITU) or critical care unit (CCU), is a special department of a hospital or health care facility that provides intensive care medicine.
Neurocritical care is a medical field that treats life-threatening diseases of the nervous system and identifies, prevents, and treats secondary brain injury.
Geriatric intensive care unit is a special intensive care unit dedicated to management of critically ill elderly.
Lisa A. Cooper is an American internal medicine and public health physician who is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Equity in Health and Healthcare at Johns Hopkins University, jointly appointed in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and in the departments of Health, Behavior and Society, Health Policy and Management; Epidemiology; and International Health in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the James F. Fries Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, and Director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute. Cooper is also a Gilman Scholar and a core faculty member in the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research. She is internationally recognized for her research on the impact of race, ethnicity and gender on the patient-physician relationship and subsequent health disparities. She is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). In 2007, she received a MacArthur Fellowship.
ICU Medical, Inc. is a San Clemente, California-based company with global operations. ICU Medical products are designed to prevent bloodstream infections and protect healthcare workers from exposure to infectious diseases or hazardous drugs. ICU Medical product line includes intravenous therapy (IV) products, pumps, needle-free vascular access devices, custom infusion sets, closed system hazardous drug handling devices and systems, sensor catheters, needle-free closed blood sampling systems, and hemodynamic monitoring systems.
Robert M. "Bob" Wachter is an academic physician and author. He is on the faculty of University of California, San Francisco, where he is chairman of the Department of Medicine, the Lynne and Marc Benioff Endowed Chair in Hospital Medicine, and the Holly Smith Distinguished Professor in Science and Medicine. He is generally regarded as the academic leader of the hospitalist movement, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. He and a colleague, Lee Goldman, are known for coining the term "hospitalist" in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article.
Martin Adel Makary is a British-American surgeon, professor, author and medical commentator. He practices surgical oncology and gastrointestinal laparoscopic surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, is Mark Ravitch Chair in Gastrointestinal Surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and teaches public health policy as Professor of Surgery and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Public health policy is not the same as public health, which deals mainly with infections.
Didier Pittet is an infectious diseases expert and the director of the Infection Control Programme and WHO Collaborating Centre on Patient Safety, University Hospital of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. Since 2005, Pittet is also the External Lead of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Patient Safety Challenge "Clean Care is Safer Care" and African Partnerships for Patient Safety.
Bleed Out is a 2018 HBO feature documentary film that explores how an American family deals with the effects of medical malpractice. The film revolves around a ten-year journey, captured through archival footage, spy-cams, and interviews. Writer-director Steve Burrows reveals the ways his mother, Judie Burrows, was afflicted for the rest of her life due to a mistake during a partial hip surgery procedure.
Sapna Ravi Kudchadkar is an American critical care physician and anesthesiologist. She is an Associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine, pediatrics and physical medicine and rehabilitation at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In 2022, she was appointed Vice Chair of Pediatric Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins as well as Anesthesiologist-in-Chief of the Johns Hopkins Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children's Center.
Sorrel King is an author, patient safety advocate, and president/co-founder of the Josie King Foundation. Her 18-month old daughter, Josie, died at Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital of dehydration due to medical error after being hospitalized for second-degree burns. Following a financial settlement from Johns Hopkins, Sorrel King started the Josie King Foundation and wrote a novel about her experience entitled Josie's Story: A Mother's Inspiring Crusade to Make Medical Care Safe.
William Padula is a professor of pharmaceutical and health economics at the University of Southern California. He is a fellow in the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics. He is a co-founder and principal for Stage Analytics. From 2021 to 2022, he was the President and chief executive officer of the National Pressure Injury Advisory Panel.
