Quality criteria for nursing care at intensive care units

Intensive care units (ICU) are multi-functional apartments of hospitals surrounding from expert staff and high-quality machinery. The aim of the present article is to emphasize the need of assessing both efficacy and productivity of the care provided in such apartments. That assessment may be succeeded on the basis of four determinative considerations which are influential for nurses in providing quality ICU care; these refer to quality control and assurance; the relationship between cost and effectiveness of care; the procedures of patients’ convalescence; and the ethical principles followed by ICU nurses. First, quality control relates to the systematic definition and assessment of those factors which influence the supply of quality care to patients. On the other hand, quality assurance refers to the comparison between hopes of patients before hospitalization and the kind of care they finally get when hospitalized. The investigation of the factor “cost” of ICU care aims to find out if the economic expenditure spent to ICU is accompanied with the provision of effective care to patients. Third, the detailed attention to convalescence procedures is associated with the possibility of nurses’ being successful in estimation, diagnosis or remedy procedures of patients’ illness; in providing counseling and psychological support to patients and their families as well as in gathering information about various problems that they face, either long or short-term. Finally, ethics refers to the acknowledgement of those basic principles which nurses should follow whenever the ethics of their decisions are doubtful.