New website to could stop intensive care beds going to waste

In the last 30 years the demand for intensive care beds has increased as intensive care treatment has changed from being considered a luxury to a necessity. Consequently many hospitals can be full at any one time, resulting in the need for critically ill patients to be transferred to hospitals with spare beds.

Lack of communication between hospitals and insufficient methods to locate spare beds make the transfer process difficult. Furthermore, the available information on spare beds can be outdated, inaccurate or simply hard to find. These problems can result in critically ill patients being transferred large distances at great risk to their health. One tragic example of these problems occurred in the UK, where a road traffic accident victim died while on a journey of over 200 miles. There may well have been beds available at nearby hospitals but staff had no means of knowing where they were.

A new website has been developed called ICUnet (http://www.icubeds.info) which aims to help doctors and nurses easily find the nearest intensive care beds for their patients. Using a password, hospitals submit the bed state of their ICU to the website, which is constantly updated. Other hospital units can then view a comprehensive, up-to-date list of nearby bed space. This system, if successfully implemented, could prevent many critically ill patients dying during transfers.

Philip Hopkins' and Anthony Wolff's article is published in the latest issue of Critical Care and can be accessed online: http://www.biomedcentral.com/ccf/cc-6-2-hopkins.pdf

For further information contact Anthony Wolff: Tony.Wolff@barnet-chase-tr.nhs.uk

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