intensive care unit

High-technology medical facility concerned with the care of patients with acute life-threatening conditions. It is characterized by the use of the most advanced medical technology – electronic monitoring, mechanical ventilation, and other life-support measures – combined with skilled nursing and drugs.

Intensive care medicine developed largely from doctors' experiences with tetanus and polio (formerly widespread). Both diseases could culminate in respiratory failure, but if breathing could be mechanically assisted patients could be sustained through the crisis and many then survived. The earliest ICUs, developed in the 1950s, were largely ventilation units, but the central principle of supporting vital organs through a crisis was soon more widely applied. Today, the ICU is also vital to the practice of most high-profile surgery (including open-heart procedures and organ transplants), which could not be undertaken without life-support back-up in the immediate post-operative period.

APACHE III (acute, physiology, age, and chronic health evaluation) is a computer program that predicts the survival chances of patients in intensive care using 19 separate health markers. It is not approved in Britain.