Introduction | PWH ICU good practice guidelines | HKCA Documents | JFICM Documents | Learning acute medicine with S-BEL

Introduction

The ICU is a Level III multidisciplinary Unit as defined by the College of Intensive Care Medicine (CICM) of Australia and New Zealand. It provides care for all specialties including general medical, general surgical, neurosurgical, cardio-thoracic and burns cases. It is administered by a Director who is supported by eight specialist Intensivists.  All of our specialists have either Fellowships in Intensive Care from the Hong Kong College of Anesthesiologist (HKCA) or Fellowships in Critical Care Medicine from the Hong Kong College of Physicians.  Most of our specialists are also fellows of CICM.  We currently have nine full time trainees in our unit.  Additional staffing is provided by specialist and trainee anaesthetists. The unit is accredited for the full two years of higher vocational training in intensive care by the HKCA and as a C24 unit by CICM.

There are 23 operational ICU beds, representing 1.5% of hospital beds at Prince of Wales Hospital. There are over 1,700 ICU admissions annually with a mean length of stay of 3.5 days. Neurosurgical patients accounts for 20% of admissions. The mean APACHE II score is 17 and the ICU mortality is about 3.4% (standardized mortality ratio using ANZROD of 0.83). The ICU is also responsible for resuscitation services within the hospital. There is an active educational and clinical research programme resulting in a prolific publication record. 

PWH ICU good practice guidelines

Welcome to our PWH ICU good practice guidelines website. These guidelines have been developed with the aim of improving efficiency and safety in patient care, promoting evidence-based clinical practice and to facilitate the daily running of our busy intensive care unit. The authors are all doctors from our unit, and they are identified at the footnote of each document. As guidelines go, we are still in the childhood stage; with time you can expect more topics to be added to our content page and pre-existing ones updated and revised as warranted by the evolution of medical knowledge, technology and practice.

Some of the documents are Protocols, and they are so titled. Protocols represent a standard approach to practice within our unit and must be followed. Majority of the documents are Guidelines; these are designed to assist in clinical management and courses of intervention are recommended on an evidence-based approach. Although you are strongly advised to adhere to them, guidelines are not entirely inclusive or exclusive of all methods of reasonable patient care. Ultimately, these guidelines must be applied based on individual patient situation using professional judgement.