The possibilities of the EMC Intensive Care Unit and intensive care unit

The intensive care unit in our clinic is a part of the hospital where the most serious patients are treated or are observed after complex operations.

To get an idea of what is happening in the intensive care unit, let's try to answer a few questions.

Who is being treated in intensive care?

The majority of patients in the intensive care unit at our clinic are patients after surgery. With simple surgical procedures, monitoring is carried out from half an hour to several hours, and only after making sure that the patient is fully awake after anesthesia, such important indicators as blood pressure, pulse, breathing are stable, and pain is not bothering him, the issue of transfer to a hospital ward is resolved.

After more complex operations, such as hip replacement or major surgery on the stomach or intestines, the patient is observed and treated in intensive care for about a day or longer, until the condition is fully stabilized and vital functions are restored.

The most severe category is patients with combined injuries, multiple fractures, or serious health problems requiring temporary replacement of the function of various organs and systems. For example, patients with extremely severe pneumonia undergo mechanical ventilation, and patients with impaired renal function require renal replacement therapy, hemodialysis, or other methods of extrarenal blood purification. Patients with extensive heart attacks are given medications that support heart function in very precise dosages using special infusion pumps.

What do they do in the intensive care unit?

Looking at the equipment of the intensive care unit, the question involuntarily arises: is all this equipment really used? For example, let's look at the situation with a patient after a serious car accident. Chest contusion, rib fracture, lung injury – artificial ventilation is required until the chest regains its former frame and the hematomas and hemorrhages disappear in the lungs after impact. Modern devices allow for very precise selection of ventilation modes in order to maintain the patient's independent breathing, rather than completely replacing it. This provides comfort to the patient and facilitates the transition to independent breathing.

To monitor the work of the heart, a heart monitor is used – a device that records a cardiogram in a preset mode, measures blood pressure, pulse, and saturation (the oxygen content in the blood is measured using a beam of light through a nail). If necessary, the depth of the patient's sleep can be measured when the so–called drug sedation is used - artificial sleep. The technique of measuring the depth of sleep is widely used in the operating rooms of the European Medical Center, which makes it possible to tell the patient with confidence that the fear of "waking up during surgery" is unfounded.

Sometimes patients experience chills after surgery. In these situations, a fan heater is used, which blows warm air over the patient, and the tremor quickly disappears.

Some patients cannot eat for several days after a complex operation on the intestines or stomach. In these cases, the first days of nutrition are carried out intravenously with amino acid solutions, which are administered at a certain precisely calculated rate. As soon as the meal is allowed, feeding begins through the probe, or the patient drinks special nutritional mixtures for postoperative feeding on his own. We can monitor the adequacy of nutrition based on a number of tests performed by our laboratory at any time of the day or night.

In case of severe kidney diseases, we perform hemodialysis or various types of filtration with an artificial kidney device. Temporary replacement of a function makes it possible for a diseased organ to restore it after a certain period. In the photo you can see a hemodialysis session in a patient with renal insufficiency.

In some operations, to relieve pain in the postoperative period, we perform epidural anesthesia, when an anesthetic is constantly injected through a thin catheter connected to the nerve roots in the spine. This allows the patient to move freely and comfortably endure the first difficult days after surgery.

Thus, the capabilities of our intensive care unit make it possible to successfully treat patients with various serious illnesses, qualified anesthesiologists, intensive care specialists and nurses do everything necessary for a speedy recovery of the patient.