Preface

Today's intensive care unit is a technologically rich environment where skilled teams employ advanced treatments to monitor and support organ systems in patients with medical illnesses, following traumatic injuries, or after surgery. While the invasive procedures undertaken in the intensive care unit (ICU) may come with benefits, they often come with risks, including those of infection, bleeding, procedural errors, and device failure. For a variety of reasons, including increasing specialization, workforce turnover, and constrained training hours, it is not uncommon for nursing and medical practitioners to have limited exposure to advanced critical care procedures. This book was designed to illustrate the fundamentals of a broad variety of techniques organized by organ system, and to thereby serve as an introduction to critical care interventions. Each procedure chapter consists of an introduction, definitions and terms, techniques, pearls and pitfalls, as well as a series of illustrative line art and photographs. The book is designed for students, novice practitioners, and experts who want exposure to procedures outside of their general field of expertise. In addition to the printed material, a DVD containing narrated video segments depicting procedures commonly performed in the ICU has been included as part of the book.