Patients who require intensive care have recently increased because of an increase in elderly patients and developments in the treatment of severe illnesses. It is important for saving more of those patients to effectively utilize the limited number of beds in an intensive care unit (ICU). The aim of this study is to clarify the current status and issues about intensive care for patients with severe illness in our ICU.
We investigated 819 patients who were admitted to the ICU between 1st April 2016 and 31st March 2017.
Median age was 68 years. Over 90% of the patients were treated surgically and 49.2% of them had cardiovascular disease.
The operation rate of beds was 80% and the share of beds per day was 100%. Patient outcomes revealed that 96.8% of patients recovered sufficiently to be moved to a general ward and the ICU mortality rate was 2.4%. Forty-four patients (5.4%) stayed in the ICU longer than 14 days. Those long-stay patients had more emergency admissions, higher APACHE II scores and a higher ICU mortality rate than the other 775 patients who were discharged within 14 days. Eighty-two patients who required intensive care could not be admitted to the ICU because beds were fully occupied.
Overall patient outcomes were relatively good but many patients could not be admitted to the ICU due to a shortage of beds. Establishing a step-down unit for long-stay patients with severe illness might solve this problem.
