Summary of Intensive and Coronary Care Units

• High quality ICUs are equipped with medical devices such as mechanical ventilators, bedside monitors, digital cardio tachometers, pacemakers, defibrillators, dialysis equipments etc.
• The biological information related to the patient from the bedside monitors can be analyzed by the concerned physician or nurse to provide better care.
• The various parameters from different ICU units can be sent to a central monitoring console for detailed analysis and care.
• A CCU (Critical or coronary) care unit is a special care units dealing with the care of patients with diseases connected with heart(such as heart attack).
• The cardio tachometers are used to count the heart rate of patients.
• The function of differentiator in analog cardio tachometer is to avoid double counting.
• The output of R-wave discriminator is applied to a level detector .The level detector produce an output voltage change only when the predetermined input voltage level is exceeded.
• Integrator averages the pulses applied to its input from the mono stable output.
• The difference between analog and digital tachometer is that the output from the mono stable is applied to a 4- in -1 generator.
• In cardio tachometers, alarm circuits are provided on bedside monitors to warn the staff on an emergency condition.
• Here the mechanical arrangement of alarm is designed in such a way that it will turn ON when heart rate is too low or too high.
• In modern central monitoring console units, the entire information of different patients from different bedside monitors are collected and displayed.
• The staff at the central monitoring console can continuously monitor the patients and the number of staffs at the bedside monitors can be reduced.

Author Bio: The Author of this article, Sreejith is writing articles on Intensive Care Unit and Critical Care Unit and Trivandrum Portal