People with life-threatening injuries and illnesses need critical care. Critical care involves close, constant attention by a team of specially-trained health professionals. It usually takes place in an intensive care unit (ICU) or trauma center. Problems that might need critical care treatment include complications from surgery, accidents, infections and severe breathing problems.

Monitors, intravenous (IV) tubes, feeding tubes, catheters, ventilators and other equipment are common in critical care units. These can sustain life but can also increase the risk of infection.

While patients may recover, death is a possibility for people in critical care. Communication with health care providers and family members is an important part of making end-of-life decisions.

What is critical care?
Critical  care is the multiprofessional healthcare specialty that cares for patients with acute, life-threatening illness or injury. Nearly 80 percent of all Americans will experience a critical illness or injury, either as the patient, family member or friend of a patient.

Critical care can be provided wherever life is threatened - at the scene of an accident, in an ambulance or medivac helicopter, in a hospital trauma center or emergency room, or in the operating room. Most critical care today, however, is delivered in highly specialized intensive care units and trauma centers. Critical care is provided by multiprofessional teams of highly experienced and professional physicians, nurses, respiratory care technicians, pharmacists and other allied health professionals who use their unique expertise, ability to interpret important therapeutic information, access to highly sophisticated equipment and the services of support personnel to provide care that leads to the best outcome for the patient.

Patients are rarely admitted directly to the critical care unit. Rather, they are usually admitted from the emergency room, trauma center or surgical area where they are first given care and stabilized. The continuum of critical care begins at the moment of illness or injury and continues throughout the patient's hospitalization, treatment and subsequent recovery.