Number, capacity of ICUs growing steadily
The capacity of intensive care in China has been climbing steadily in recent years, but more efforts are needed to strengthen critical care services in grassroots hospitals through sharpening their early warning systems and deploying remote technologies, a senior medical expert said on Friday.
The number of hospitals with intensive care units in China has quadrupled in the past decade to reach over 4,000, and there are now over 60,000 intensive care professionals and 100,000 nurses specializing in critical care, said Qiu Haibo, head of the Clinical Quality Control Center for Critical Care Medicine in China.
According to a report that examined about 3,000 hospitals with intensive care departments across the country, a total of 2.1 million intensive care patients had received treatment last year, with a death rate of 8.3 percent.