Are they the really difficult patients to care for? For example, if they hemorrhage or are DIC, would they be considered the top most challenging/high risk patients in the ICU? Anyways, is there such as list of very challenging "types" of ICU patients?
Answer:
Maternity ICU patients who are still pregnant are challenging because you have two patients to be concerned about. Postpartum ICU patients can also be very difficult to treat.
As far as the MOST challenging, I'd go with the folks who were just barely keeping it all together health-wise, and then got into an accident, or broke a hip, and then the whole house of cards came crashing down. These are the ones who won't come off the ventilator, get infections, have renal failure, and just never really bounce back.
The maternity patients are at least young, and can stand more stress than the elderly.
Just my $0.02.
I've seen one, MYSELF, I had pneumonia, heart failure, severe anemia, hypoproteinemia, edema (swelling of he body), sever pruiritic (itchy) rash allover my body, premature contractions, thrombocytopenia, preeclampsia after delivery, urinary tract infection, melena (black stool most probably from a GIT ulcer) I received blood transfusion 3 times (rare blood group though) and protein transfusion 9 times. that's all as far as I remember.
Other serious ICU patients could be people coming in accidents.
However, all ICU patients are difficult cases as they are usually dying.
Each and every patient within the ICU is difficult it is a ward that the majority of patients don't get the opportunity to return to there homes; and if they do then they are more than likely to be left some type of impairment. Then there are the patients that are not in danger but not as sever and they are admitted to a Critical Care Unit (CCU) these ones more than likely will return to a normal life or with a possibility of minimal impairment.
I worked years ago as head nurse within a ICU and the worst was to watch the parents of teen age girl that had OD'd on street drugs that eventually died.
Working in an ICU is very hard and you have to be a special person to do this type of work.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment