History and evolution of critical care medicine: From intensive care to intensive therapy and critical care

Abstract:

Critical care medicine is a specialty that supports other specialties, both clinical and surgical. It is responsible for the study of patients in critical condition, or at risk of developing one, through the clinical assistance with the use of several processes that must be performed in separate areas of the hospital, often referred to as intensive care units. In the present review, a systematic search was carried out on articles published in English and Spanish, with no date limit, in PubMed, Medline, Latindex, and Google Scholar databases, and for articles that included the keywords “intensive care units”, “intensive care units/history”, “history of critical care medicine”, and related studies. Specific topics were then consulted according to the bibliographic references presented in the analysed studies. This study allowed us to construct a narrative description of the world history of critical care medicine, in its need to isolate the most serious patients, which is known as intensive care, and whose antecedents date back to the 1850s. This need resurfaced in 1920 with the use of exclusive rooms for post-operative management. Intensive therapy emerged in the 1940s with the creation of specific devices and processes of physiological support. Finally, the modern and contemporary era, which is characterised by critical care, the complexity of patients and procedures developed, as well as complementary examinations and multidisciplinary care teams. Lastly, given the disparity in the delivery of critical care worldwide, historical perspectives, care characteristics, and clinical outcomes are described in several zones distributed by geographic areas such as the United States of America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, and less developed countries.

Año de publicación:

2017

Keywords:

• EVOLUTION
• Intensive therapy
• intensive care
• History
• Critical care
• Critical care medicine

Fuente:

scopus