Infectious Diseases in Critical Care Medicine (Infectious Disease and Therapy) by Cunha

图书介绍

The demand for increasing accountability with respect to the cost of health care has escalated pressure on physicians to manage an increasing fraction of their patients' illnesses in the outpatient setting. Primary care physicians, in conjunction with an expanding health care team, now provide diagnostic evaluations and treatment for patients with increasingly complex health problems outside the hospital. As a consequence, patients who do require hospitalization are extremely sick. One can envision that with progressive advances in outpatient care, many of our acute care hospitals will consist almost entirely of wards of intensive care or step-down units capable of providing cardiopulmonary monitoring and support for patients with multiple-organ failure.

Moreover, as a result of impressive improvements in supportive care in the intensive care unit, very sick patients are surviving the acute phase of their illnesses. Simultaneously, the microbial world has mounted creative counteroffensives by becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics (e.g., vancomycin-resistant enterococcus). This, together with the rising prevalence of the human immunodeficiency virus and the emergence of such pathogens as ehrlichia and human herpesvirus 6, makes Infectious Diseases in Critical Care Medicine a welcome addition to the medical literature.