Cardiac Intensive Care Unit
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About 40,000 children a year are born with a heart defect. Because of their many special needs, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh has opened the first Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) in the region.
At the new CICU, surgeons can repair tiny hearts, give toddlers a chance for a lifetime with transplanted hearts and provide even more children with the opportunity to live and breathe for weeks on a mechanical pump until a donor heart becomes available.
In addition to its eight beds, the CICU has isolation rooms for young transplant patients with delicate immune systems. Specially designed beds allow surgeons to operate in an emergency, saving precious time.
The technologically advanced CICU is designed to meet the needs of a growing number of complex cases, says Ricardo Muñoz, MD, chief, who adds that newborns only several years ago were not considered candidates for surgery. Now, thanks to medical advances, they are. As a result, they “warrant more specialized care.”
The CICU, on Children’s sixth floor — down the hall from the 23-bed general pediatric general intensive care unit it once shared — is comprised of a highly specialized team trained in the care of children with congenital heart disease. These specialists are charting the course for each patient’s recovery.
With its new CICU, Children’s is moving ahead in this amazing frontier
of technologies while focusing on its determination to save young lives.
Read
more. (Colors magazine, Fall 2002 issue)
