ICU Organization: Does it Matter?

“Physicians tend to be unimpressed with the descriptions of intensive care units (ICUs). It seems to them that the assessments of the results are naive, survival being taken as equivalent of a life saved. They suspect that, however expert the handling of an apparatus, there is still a shallow understanding of the disease and over-readiness to employ the most dramatic treatment... One is tempted to say that the treatment is often more intense than careful... I believe, therefore, with many of my colleagues, that (the development of ICUs) will prove to have been an aberrations”