What does the Department of Critical Care Medicine do?

I believe that many people are very unfamiliar with the subject of critical care medicine. This is a new diagnosis and treatment subject added by the Ministry of Health. This diagnosis and treatment subject mainly targets critically ill patients. In daily life, people will have some very serious diseases that directly endanger their lives. Therefore, it is very important to get a correct diagnosis in the emergency department. This is when the critical care medicine department will play a role.

What does the Department of Critical Care Medicine do?

What diseases does the Department of Critical Care Medicine treat?

What diseases does the Department of Critical Care Medicine treat? Simply put, all life-threatening or potentially life-threatening diseases or conditions are within the scope of critical care medicine. The Department of Critical Care Medicine concentrates a hospital's most advanced monitoring and treatment equipment, has the fastest green channel for diagnosis and treatment, and has a dedicated rescue team and rescue measures. Therefore, the admission of critically ill patients to the Department of Critical Care Medicine can greatly reduce the risk of death in the near future.

Critical care medicine originated from ICU. ICU is the abbreviation of Intensive Care Unit, which is called intensive care unit or intensive care unit in Chinese. The ICU can be traced back to the Crimean War from 1853 to 1856. It was during that war that Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, created the prototype of the modern ICU and its management model in order to reduce the infection rate of war wounds, which significantly reduced the mortality rate of war wounded patients.

The world's first real ICU was born in 1926. It was a neurosurgery ICU with only three beds created by Walter Edward Dandy, a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The world's first comprehensive ICU was established by Peter Safar, the father of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, at Baltimore City Hospital in 1958. The establishment of the American Society of Critical Care Medicine in 1971 marked the official birth of critical care medicine. Critical care medicine has evolved from an intensive care unit into an independent medical discipline.

Critical Care Medicine, in the United States it is called the Department of Critical Care Medicine, and in Europe it is called the Department of Intensive Care Medicine. In China, after experiencing three major public health incidents: the SARS pandemic in 2004, the hand, foot and mouth disease in 2008, and the Wenchuan earthquake, national leaders and decision-makers have deeply realized the importance of critical care medicine in the critical moments of saving lives. On February 13, 2009, the then Ministry of Health promulgated the "Guidelines for the Construction and Management of Critical Care Medicine Departments", requiring that hospitals at or above the second level (county and municipal hospitals) must establish critical care medicine departments. At the same time, the Department of Critical Care Medicine was approved as a secondary discipline in clinical medicine (discipline classification number 320.58). The promulgation and implementation of this guideline marks that critical care medicine has officially become an independent secondary clinical discipline in China, alongside internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, neurology, psychiatry, and emergency medicine. In accordance with the requirements of the guidelines, hospitals at all levels and in all regions have removed their original ICU signs and changed them to critical care medicine departments.