Outcome of the Critically Ill

A clinical manual of outcome predictions for critically ill intensive care unit patients in the three main critical care categories of medicine, surgery and trauma, and for general patient groups. It uses statistical outcome data compiled by the author from a review of the literature.

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Providing a comprehensive yet diverse framework, Outcome of the Critically Ill: Medicine, Surgery, and Trauma provides an understanding of the intricacies of critical care medicine. Designed along three individual "templates" of understanding, it presents a survey of prognostication and prediction of clinical outcome in the critically ill.

Section one provides a medical model. The author presents typical issues encountered in a medical intensive care unit based on acute and subacute disease progression. He examines studies and experimental models that predict clinically relevant outcome based on the involvement of a particular organ system and correlates the cursory examination of cell-mediated cytokineresponse with patient survival, morbidity, and mortality.

Section two focuses on the surgical care model featuring pre-operative risk assessment in anesthesia and care provided in the peri-operative phase of recovery. Conditions examined include those surgical problems resulting in significant illness such as intra-abdominal catastrophe and multisystem organ involvement secondary to the rigors of surgery itself. This section includes a survey encompassing all aspects of general surgery, cardiovacular, transplant medicine, and the surgical subspelcialities.

The third section explores the proportion of critical care resources directed toward the care of patients suffering multisystem trauma and significant head injury. This allows you to examine and compare the program scoring systems specifically directed toward trauma management and functional outcome predictors often associated with head and neurosurgical injury.

Ideally, careful planning and understanding of disease pathophysiology and patient monitoring will allow the avoidance of both disease progression and iatrogenic complications. Outcome of the Critically Ill: Medicine, Surgery, and Trauma gives you the tools to develop a careful, comprehensive strategy to care for the critically ill, analyzing all aspects of the disease process to minimize errors and allow the most benefit possible to patients and families so that realistic probability estimates may be presented.