Does Critical Care Medicine exist and what defines its area of practice? Different countries have embarked on their own journeys of discovery, and have arrived at different paradigms—open versus closed models, specialty-based intensive care units (ICUs) versus general ICUs, internist versus pulmonologist or anaesthetist, and so forth. This article is...

Critical care is costly as it is labour intensive and involves expensive life support technology. In the United States, the intensive care units (ICUs) use about 15% of the total hospital cost or about 1% of the gross national product. This article is available only as a PDF. Please click...

The Singapore General Hospital is a 1700-bedded tertiary hospital with subspecialty intensive care units (ICUs), i.e. Surgical ICU, Cardiothoracic ICU, Neurosurgical ICU, Medical ICU, Burns ICU, Medical ICU, Coronary Care Unit and Neonatal ICU. The SICU receives patients from various surgical disciplines (Table I). This article is available only as...

The Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II (APACHE II) and the new Simplified Acute Physiology Score (SAPS II) scoring systems are widely used prognostic tools in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). These scoring systems calculate a “risk of death” (ROD) for ICU patients while adjusting for case-mix with severity...

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is widely practised for cardiopulmonary arrests with variable success. The initial intention was to defibrillate patients with ventricular fibrillation after acute myocardial infarction, to save those with “hearts too good to die”. This article is available only as a PDF. Please click on “Download PDF” on top...