For many years, intensive care has focused on avoiding immediate death from acute, life-threatening conditions. However, there are increasing reports of a number of lingering consequences for those who do indeed survive intensive care. Examples include on-going high risk of death, neurocognitive defects, significant caregiver burden, and continued high healthcare costs.
Surviving Intensive Care, written by the world's experts in this area, is dedicated to better understanding the consequences of surviving intensive care and is intended to provide a synopsis of the current knowledge and a stimulus for future research and improved care of the critically ill.

From the reviews:

"This sleek and modern-appearing paperback is a recent publication by Springer-Verlag, in the series Update in Intensive Care Medicine. Surviving Intensive Care has clear typography, high-quality paper, and a strong binding . The illustrations and tables are clear and generally informative. As a whole, Surviving Intensive Care is probably most of interest to clinical researchers interested in considering long-term outcomes as primary or secondary end points of observational or interventional research in the ICU." (Catherine Lee Hough, Respiratory Care, Vol. 50 (9), September, 2005)

Inhalt
Natural History of Critical Illness.- Survival as an Outcome for ICU Patients.- Morbidity and Functional Limitation in Survivors of ARD.- Health-related Quality of Life.- The Neuropsychological Consequences of Intensive Care.- The Burden of Caregiving on Families of ICU Survivors.- Long-term Economic Consequences of Surviving Intensive Care.- Understanding Outcomes of Critically Ill Older Patients.- Measuring the Health Status of Pediatric ICU Survivors.- Predictors and Modifiers of Long-tern Outcomes.- Pre-ICU Factors.- Intra-ICU patient factors.- ICU Environmental Factors and Quality of Sleep in Critically Ill Patients.- The Impact of Routine ICU Supportive Care on Long-term Outcomes from Critical Illness.- Improving Methods to Capture Long-term Outcomes in Clinical Studies.- Disease-free Survival and Quality of Life as End-points in Clinical Trials.- Surrogate Measures of Patient-centered Outcomes in Critical Care.- Measuring Health Status after Critical Illness: Where Are We and Where Do We Go from Here?.- How Should We Assess Neuropsychological Sequelae of Critical Illness?.- How Can We Evaluate Information Provided to Family Members in the ICU?.- Approaches to Improve Long-term Outcomes.- How Should We Measure the Economic Consequences of Critical Illness?.- Modifying Triage Decisions to Optimize Long-term Outcomes.- Preventing Nosocomial Infections to Improve Outcome of Intensive Care.- Preventing Iatrogenic Complications.- Changing ICU Behavior to Focus on Long-term Outcomes.- L.O.V.E. and Quality of Life within the ICU: How can it improve Patient Outcome?.- Re-organizing Health Care Systems to Optimize Critical Care Outcomes.- Defining' success'in ICU Care..