Critical Care

Critical Care Medicine on the North Shore

Severe or life-threatening conditions require special care. Lahey Clinic has dedicated surgical, medical, cardiac, and neurologic-focused intensive care units

Whatever you or your loved ones may be facing, the intensive care units (ICUs) at Lahey provide the most leading-edge techniques to fight illness and offer safe recovery.

What Is Critical Care?

Critical care offers close monitoring and treatment after major surgery, organ failure or severe trauma. If you require a ventilator to breathe, you receive critical care.

At Lahey, intensivists lead multidisciplinary teams to work together to heal critically ill patients. They use evidence-based treatments, collaboration with specialist consultants, and employ leading-edge technology to ensure high-quality survival and recovery.

In cases of respiratory failure, the ICU teams use ventilators to breathe for them. Every day our intensivists stabilize, diagnose, treat and wean support to give patients the best chance possible at recovery.

Types of Critical Care Units

Most critical care patients stay in our medical intensive care unit (ICU). We provide specialized critical care units, including:

• Interdisciplinary Medical Critical Care: for treating sepsis, multi-organ failure, and other rare but serious illnesses
• Surgical ICU (SICU): for post-transplant, trauma, or cardiothoracic surgery patients to stabilize and recover from surgeries and traumatic injury
• Neurosciences Critical Care Unit (NCCU): for patients with severe neurological illness or injury and patients recovering from certain neurosurgical operations and neurointerventional procedures
• Coronary Care Unit: For patients with severe heart disease or heart failure needing specialty heart support

Conditions We Treat

You may need critical or intensive care for a variety of conditions. Our intensivists treat and manage:

End of Life Care in the ICU

Intensivist teams treat and stabilize life threatening conditions, but sometimes recovery is not always possible. ICU and palliative care teams work together to honor family and patient goals of care at all times, and sometimes their job is to help families through the difficult decision about when and whether to withdraw invasive life support.

Multidisciplinary and Comprehensive Critical Care

At Lahey, many experts work on our critical care teams. These team members include:

• Intensivists are specialized physicians with training in prolonged life-support modalities, resuscitation, ventilator management, and weaning.
• Critical care advanced practice providers (APPs) are specially trained nurse practitioners and physician assistants who take care of critically ill patients.
• Critical care nurses specialize in life-support medications and machines.
• ECMO specialists provide 24/7 care for patients maintained on heart-lung bypass machines in the ICU.
• Respiratory therapists manage respiratory support medications and devices, from CPAP machines to ventilators.
• Advanced heart failure cardiologists provide specialty care for heart failure.
• Critical care pharmacists specialize in ICU medication dosing and therapies.
• Anesthesiologists and pain specialists keep patients comfortable and manage pain, both inside and outside of the operating room.
• Pulmonologists help patients breath, sometimes with ventilators.
• Surgeons consult and perform critical procedures and life-saving operations.

Critical care medicine is a team sport, no matter where a patient is located. Whether in the Neurosciences CCU or the SICU, our teams work together 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to provide the highest level of care to patients in Lahey ICUs.

Top Quality Care and Safety

We work hard to provide care that meets the highest levels of quality and safety.

We provide patients and staff with the information and resources they need to put safety first. We track our performance and patient-to-nurse ratio to ensure safe, effective care. We frequently share our data with patients, colleagues and regulatory agencies.