UCLH Critical Care offers the opportunity to participate in a wide range of adult general intensive care and high dependency care. This is a busy 35-bed unit admitting in excess of 3000 patients per year. The Outreach Team is part of the department; senior trainees help in assessment and stabilisation of patients on the wards as part of the outreach team (Patient Emergency Response Resuscitation Team, PERRT). The unit accepts all level 2 and 3 admissions in the Trust, except for patients requiring specialist thoracic or neurosurgery, who are admitted to UCLH at Westmoreland Street or NHNN ITU respectively.
UCLH is the regional centre for the management of complex haematological disorders including TTP and infectious & tropical diseases. We also have the regional Hyper-Acute Stroke Unit, and are a tertiary referral centre for intestinal failure, complex abdominal surgery, bariatric, ENT, maxillofacial and endocrine surgery.
UCLH has a large haematology and oncology unit, including a teenage cancer unit, and so we receive many complex patients from 13 years of age and up, with haematological malignancy,after bone marrow or stem cell transplant and with neutropenic sepsis. The Critical Care Unit itself specialises in the management of complex ventilatory disorders and pioneering medical devices and we look after the full range of critically ill patients in multi-organ failure referred via the Emergency Department and the medical/surgical wards.
The unit offers a wide range of ventilatory support from high level invasive ventilation for ARDS through specialist weaning to non-invasive ventilation.
The Critical Care Unit has a strong research base with close links with the Bloomsbury Institute of Intensive Care Medicine, access to expertise in basic and translational research and an active teaching and audit programme – see below.
The Critical Care Unit has clinical expertise in transthoracic echocardiography for emergency diagnostics and good links with the department of radiology. Trainees are encouraged to seek opportunities to learn basic echo and ultrasound techniques and build logbook numbers; mentors are allocated to support these efforts.
