acute care

Acute care is a branch of secondary health care where a patient receives active but short-term treatment for a severe injury or episode of illness, an urgent medical condition, or during recovery from surgery.^[1][2] In medical terms, care for acute health conditions is the opposite from chronic care, or longer term care.

Acute care services are generally delivered by teams of health care professionals from a range of medical and surgical specialties. Acute care may require a stay in a hospital emergency department, ambulatory surgery center, urgent care centre or other short-term stay facility, along with the assistance of diagnostic services, surgery, or follow-up outpatient care in the community.^[2] Hospital-based acute inpatient care typically has the goal of discharging patients as soon as they are deemed healthy and stable.^[3] Acute care settings include but are not limited to: emergency department, intensive care, coronary care, cardiology, neonatal intensive care, and many general areas where the patient could become acutely unwell and require stabilization and transfer to another higher dependency unit for further treatment.

Current issues in acute care

Australia

The 2008 "Final Report of the Special Commission of Inquiry into Acute Care Services in NSW Public Hospitals", known as The Garling Report, documented a series of high profile medical controversies in the New South Wales public hospital system, and issued over one hundred recommendations that stimulated considerable discussion and controversy.^[4]

United States

An important aspect of the current health care crisis in the US is the result of the growing need for acute care despite a decrease in the number of facilities which provide that care. This mismatch has resulted from the dramatic increase in the number of patients who are uninsured or underinsured, and therefore unable to pay for services rendered. Those patients often turn to emergency departments for their primary care needs. That has resulted in overcrowding and made it increasingly difficult to focus adequate resources on those patients who present with true emergencies.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Acute Care of at-Risk Newborns
• Acute medicine
• Health care
  • Primary care
  • Secondary care
  • Reason for encounter

References