© 2003 BMJ Publishing Group & British Thoracic Society
EDITORIAL
Intensive care medicine
Pulmonary physicians, intensive care medicine and Thorax: an evolving relationship
1 Senior Lecturer in Intensive Care Medicine, Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
2 Professor of Intensive Care Medicine, Royal Brompton Hospital, London, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor T W Evans
Royal Brompton Hospital, London SW3 6NP, UK; t.evans@rbh.nthames.nhs.uk
Intensive care medicine as a separate specialty will impact on the availability of services, training of pulmonary physicians, and the content of respiratory medicine journals such as Thorax.
Keywords: intensive care medicine; training; Thorax
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In the 1990s a series of well publicised cases, in which critically ill patients were moved large distances in order to gain access to intensive care facilities, led to the recognition that the provision of intensive care services in the UK was characterised by unacceptable variations in organisation and delivery, quantity, funding, and effectiveness. It was appreciated that the ad hoc development of the discipline of intensive care medicine—following its origins in the polio epidemics of the 1950s—was responsible in part for this unhappy state of affairs. However, it was also apparent that there had been years of relative underfunding of intensive care units (ICUs) in the UK compared with other developed societies. The provision of ICU beds in the UK has historically been one of the smallest in the industrialised world. Only 2.6% of hospital beds were designated for intensive care before 2001 compared with averages
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
Services
- Email this link to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Topic Collections
-
Adult intensive care
-
Drugs: infectious diseases
-
Tropical medicine (infectious diseases)
- Neuromuscular disease
Bookmark with
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
