Intensive Care Unit Information

We support six public hospitals that have Intensive Care Units and one hospital that doesn't. To manage such a large area we run a busy Flight Retrieval Service with the capability to provide Intensive Care-level retrievals around the clock. We have 18 beds in our unit made up of 14 open bed spaces and 4 isolation beds in sealed side-rooms. Every bed space is equipped to provide either Intensive or High Dependency level care to both medical and surgical (post-operative) patients. We admit about 1800 patients every year of which 40% are elective (including 600 cardiothoracic patients). We have an average occupancy each morning of 12 patients with a range from 6 to 18. The median length of stay for patients is 28 hours, reflecting the high numbers of elective admissions. After this, 25% stay for the second day, 21% for 2-7 days, and 6% for longer than a week. We ventilate 75% of admissions and have an ICU mortality of approximately 9%. Wellington ICU Tertiary Referral Area