Journal of Intensive and Critical Care Open Access

Extended Abstract

Acute care is a branch of healthcare where patients receive active but short-term treatment for a severe or life-threatening injury, illness, routine health problems, recovery from surgery, or acute exacerbation of chronic illnesses.

Acute care settings often include hospitals, Urgent Care clinics, and surgical clinics. There are many various areas where acute care is practiced:

• Emergency care

• Urgent care

• Trauma care

• Critical care

• Neonatal and pediatric medical care

• Rehabilitative care

• Psychiatric acute care

• Acute care surgery

Demand for acute care services is additionally often unpredictable, since someone’s need for care can occur at any hour of the day on any day of the year. This reality requires some ongoing investment within the costs required to stay buildings open and staffed, whether it's a 24-hour facility like an emergency department or an after-hours clinic.

Finally, acute care encompasses the challenge of providing standby capacity to accommodate those situations where there's a public health crisis sort of an influenza epidemic or local tragedy like a mass shooting.

A nurse in acute care will be responsible for time-sensitive illnesses and injury, rapid intervention to prevent death or disability, and restoring optimal health to your patients. In these sorts of settings, patients can often decline quickly and all of sudden. Therefore, acute care nurses must be ready to react quickly and efficiently during high stress situations. Emotions can run high during these events, especially with severe or lifethreatening emergencies, in order that they must be ready to remain professional while practicing empathy for patients and their families, too.

Acute care nurses use almost all the talents you'll imagine to worry for these patients. One patient may have labs drawn, an IV placed for fluids, and an assessment every hour, while another patient is coding and needing CPR with a rapid response team to bring them back to life. Acute care nursing means you're using your critical thinking skills, prioritizing your patients supported acuity of illness or injury. Once the patient is stable, they're going to usually be discharged. If the patient is unable to be restored to relatively better health, they're typically transferred to long-term care or a neighborhood better suited to treat their condition or injury, such as a rehabilitation center.

Timely care will only become a priority if clinics, hospital emergency departments, doctors and nurses, and health systems face financial or reputational consequences for unfair delays in responding to patients’ acute needs. Currently there's little accountability to adopting timeliness as a universal value in health care.

Finally, acute care must be fully integrated into health reform efforts that have thus far primarily emphasized improving look after chronic disease and hospital stays. Yet acute illness represents a substantial responsibility for the U.S. health care system. The focus should get on getting the foremost value for the services that patients receive once they seek look after their unexpected health needs. This includes getting proper care quickly at reasonable cost.