Patient Care: From Body to Mind

Nursing care in critical care settings is a highly technological, multi-faceted world, where sophisticated equipment, skilled interpersonal interaction and maintenance of fundamental nursing care have to be conducted all at the same. Intensive care units have benefited recently from highly technological innovations; this has allowed us to obtain faster and more accurate diagnoses, to propose more efficient organ replacement therapies and to improve and accelerate patient outcomes. Beyond the technical aspects of intensive care medicine, the nature of critically ill patients, their frailty puts patient care in an outstanding place, as they depend upon the care team to perform all basic everyday acts: from breathing to nutrition, personal hygiene and to protect them from environmental insult. Progress in medicine has evolved in such a way that patients are actually suffering more from conditions related to lack of basic, essential nursing care, such as pressure ulcers, urinary catheter infections or falls (World Health Orgqnization Guidelines on core components of infection prevention and control programmes at the national and acute care facility level. WHO, 2016, Currie et al., Am J Infect Control 46:936–942, 2018). The challenge for caregivers is now to master and control these innovations, while also being able to continue to provide patient care that meets the WHO definition of what should be the quality in care: safe, effective, timely, efficient, equitable and patient-centred care [World Health Organization, https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/44102/1/9789241597906_eng.pdf ] to prevent complications delaying ICU discharge.