A workforce survey of critical care nurses in the National Health Service.

Aim: To measure key aspects of the critical care nursing workforce across the National Health Service (NHS) and compare these with recommended standards where they exist.

Background: The provision of high-quality and safe critical care services is dependent on adequate numbers of highly skilled nurses. Understanding the issues and challenges within critical care services across the NHS is key to future planning and policy in this area.

Reducing ventilator associated pneumonia in adult patients through high standards of oral care: a historical control study.

Objectives: Implement and evaluate the impact of oral hygiene measures (teeth brushing, 1% oral chlorhexidine and oropharyngeal suction) on the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) and the costs of prevention and treatment.

Design: A historical control study of all 1087 patients, mechanically ventilated for at least 48hours in a general adult critical care unit, between July 2009 and December 2011. The incidence of VAP in 528 patients before a practice change was compared with the incidence in 559 patients after a practice change.

A critical review and synthesis of qualitative research on patient experiences of critical illness.

Aims: To critically review the literature in order to describe the themes associated with the experience of critical illness and consider how these inform the patients understanding.

Background: Critical illness requires life-saving intervention and application of high technology medicine and intensive nursing within a specialist critical care unit. Whilst an extensive and rapidly advancing knowledge of the physiological basis for treating critical illness exists, understanding how critical illness is experienced by the patient is less well understood.

Developing and evaluating critical care follow-up.

The effects of critical illness not only affect the patient and relative during the intensive care stay but often affect for a considerable time afterwards. A growing body of opinion and evidence suggests that many of the needs of those who have been critically ill can be met through critical care follow-up services. A growing number of follow-up services now exist.

From ward-based critical care to educational curriculum 2: a focussed ethnographic case study.

The earlier published literature review (Part 1) identified the limits of our current understanding of the context of ward-based critical care nursing. Critical care curriculum for acute ward nurses, which will have to develop as part of meeting the mandates for 'training' outlined in Comprehensive Critical Care [Comprehensive Critical Care: a Review of Adult Critical Care Services (2000) Department of Health], will benefit from greater understanding of the culture and context of ward-based critical care nursing. In this, Part 2, the methods and findings of a focussed ethnographic case study are presented.

From ward-based critical care to educational curriculum 1: a literature review.

There has been recent recognition in the literature, and a longer standing awareness amongst clinicians, that critically ill patients are to be found outside of intensive care units. These patients are not always well managed and some have concluded that their care is 'suboptimal' [Br. Med.