Intensive care unit
hospital ward that provides intensive care medicine
An intensive care unit (ICU), also known as an intensive therapy unit or intensive treatment unit (ITU) or critical care unit (CCU), is a special department of a hospital or health care facility that provides intensive care medicine.
An intensive care unit was defined by the task force of the World Federation of Societies of Intensive and Critical Care Medicine as "an organized system for the provision of care to critically ill patients that provides intensive and specialized medical and nursing care, an enhanced capacity for monitoring, and multiple modalities of physiologic organ support like an endotracheal tube, a gastric feeding pump, EEGs and EKGs to sustain life during a period of life-threatening organ system insufficiency."
Patients may be referred directly from an emergency department or from a ward if they rapidly deteriorate, or immediately after surgery if the surgery is very invasive and the patient is at high risk of complications.
History
In 1854, Florence Nightingale left for the Crimean War, where triage was used to separate seriously wounded soldiers from those with non-life-threatening conditions. Nightingale provided several simple but powerful interventions: a clean environment, medical equipment, clean water, and fruits. With this work, the mortality rate decreased from 60% to 42% and then to 2.2%
In response to a polio epidemic (where many patients required constant ventilation and surveillance), Bjørn Aage Ibsen established the first intensive care unit globally in Copenhagen in 1953.
The first application of this idea in the United States was in 1951 by Dwight Harken. Harken's concept of intensive care has been adopted worldwide and has improved the chance of survival for patients. He opened the first intensive care unit in 1951.
In 1955, William Mosenthal, a surgeon at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center also opened an early intensive care unit. In the 1960s, the importance of cardiac arrhythmias as a source of morbidity and mortality in myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) was recognized.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Intensive care unit” is hospital ward that provides intensive care medicine. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Intensive, care and unit, not as a finished interpretation.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5094647. The Library of Congress control number is sh85067186. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1854, 1953, 1951 and 1955.
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This entry incorporates text from “Intensive care unit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.