HDU & Outreach Services
HDU & Outreach Services
This is an exciting new development within the PICU at RHSC Edinburgh. Following the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health’s guidance on provision of High Dependency Care (2014- Time to Move on – a focus on the critically ill child pathway beyond the PICU) and after extensive consultation with involved paediatric teams within the hospital HDU and Outreach services have been launched in RHSC in late 2018.
The current aims of the HDU team are-
Covering critical care level 1+2 patients in collaboration with specialty teams within the Critical care floor with the benefits of:
- Shared care arrangement – input from specialist teams already involved in care (for example- Respiratory, ARU, Surgical, GI, Haematology- Oncology and Neurology teams). There are agreed roles and responsibilities of teams involved in care.
- Optimal arrangements for ward rounds, communication and handover
- Ensure educational opportunities
- Communication with families
Outreach service for ward areas:
- Review of watchers ( those children highlighted by primary teams as being unwell needing close monitoring or deterioration in clinical condition)
- Review of recent critical care discharges
- Review of patients receiving HDU level care in other areas
- Referrals from wards/A+E potentially requiring critical care admission or with complex background/recent critical care admission needing medical review (e.g. Surgical patients)
- Role in planning/coordination of care for complex patients requiring frequent hospital and critical care admissions