Critical Care

The Department of Critical Care (DCC) is a special ward that provides care for people who are critically ill, have an unstable condition or may require close monitoring after surgery. Patients can be admitted from all speciality areas in the hospital.

Read more about DCC at Cheltenham General Hospital or DCC at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital.

When admitted to the department, our patients are managed by the Critical Care team in consultation with the original team that admitted the patient to the hospital. Other specialist teams may be involved if it will help aid the patient’s recovery.

The critical care medical teams consist of several intensive care consultants. These include a lead consultant for each department, specialist senior registrars and Foundation Year 1 & 2 trainees. The team of more than 140 critical care nurses across the two departments are led by the critical care Matron and supported by the senior sisters and a practice development team.

The wider multi-disciplinary critical care team includes dedicated critical care pharmacists, a team of physiotherapists, dieticians and a nurse led bereavement follow up team. Each department has regular weekly multidisciplinary team meetings to enhance patient care. This includes discussing service development, training requirements’ and opportunities, clinical governance and safety briefing.

Our Critical Care Departments have both been rated as 'outstanding' by the Care Quality Commission.

Useful links

• BRAKE - The Road Safety Charity. Brake is a road safety charity dedicated to stopping deaths and injuries on roads and caring for people bereaved and injured on the road.
• Cruse Bereavement Care - Cruse Bereavement Care exists to promote the well-being of bereaved people and to enable anyone bereaved by death to understand their grief and cope with their loss. The organisation provides counseling and support. It offers information, advice, education and training services.
• DIPEx - Database of Individual Patient and Relative Experiences. An Oxford based registered charity. It is a database of audio, video and transcript of interviews with patients and relatives experiencing a particular illness or health problems which includes a module on critical care.
• Headway - A national charity that supports people with a brain injury and those who care for them.
• ICNARC - Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre - a sister organisation of the Intensive Care Society (ICS) the professional organisation for doctors and other professionals working in intensive care.
• ICS – Intensive Care Society. The Intensive Care Society is the longest established intensive care society in the world and sets the professional standards of care in intensive care. It is the professional organisations for doctors and other professionals working in intensive care. It is the acknowledged world leader in patient and relative involvement in all aspects of intensive care treatment and has a dedicated division specially for this work. It also supports medical research into better treatments in intensive care.
• National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) - A government funded organisation which contains a considerable number of relevant and important publications and guidance documents for the NHS.