Intensive Care - A guide for patients and relatives
This section contains advice and information about intensive care. It tells you how critical illness may be treated and what recovery may be like. Most of this guide is written for patients but there is a section specifically for relatives and visitors. By reading this booklet, relatives will learn what a patient’s recovery may involve and it will give them the answers to some of the questions they may have.
Recovery is often a long and slow process. To begin with, patients may not feel up to reading this information, so a relative could pass on information a bit at a time and let the patient read more for themselves when they feel up to it.
Although there is a lot of information in this guide, it can’t tell you everything about critical illnesses but it does try to tell you what may happen and where you can find out more. Each section covers a different stage of the process of treatment and recovery. You can read it all in one go, or you can just read each section when you need to.
This guide is produced by ICUsteps, and has been written by people who have either been treated in an intensive care unit or are close relatives of someone who has. It has also been reviewed by a wide variety of intensive care professionals, and their help has been very valuable.
One of the scariest things about having a critical illness is not knowing what’s going to happen. This guide can’t answer all your questions, but it will answer many of them. It will also tell you where you can get more information.
If you have any comments about this booklet we’d like to hear from you. You can reach us by filling in the ‘contact us’ form.