Measuring physical function after ICU: one step at a time

Excerpt

Long-term recovery after critical illness is important to patients, families and clinicians [1]. Powerful messages from patients highlight the persistent functional legacy of an intensive care unit (ICU) stay and describe the difficulties in recovering physical strength, functional capacity, and resuming domestic roles [2, 3]. In the last 10 years, clinicians and researchers have focused on both measuring these long-term patient outcomes and intervening in an attempt to attenuate them. This research has provided us with mixed messages relating to the best methods of measuring long-term outcomes, and of identifying effective interventions and the patients who may most benefit from them. It is in this context that we review physical function outcomes through the lens of four papers published in Intensive Care Medicine which have focused on outcomes from 6 months to 5 years after an ICU admission and which outline the possible next steps of our inquiry. …