Some patients in the intensive care unit spend weeks moving from one crisis to the next in a cascade of critical illness that sometimes has little connection to the original reason they were placed in the unit.
These patients seem to never quite improve enough to get out of the ICU, but also aren't dying. This group comprises 5% of ICU patients, but they consume 33% of ICU resources, and likely a vastly greater proportion of compassion and emotional resources. That's according to a new study led by University of Michigan physician Theodore Iwashyna and published this week in The Lancet.
