Background
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of intensive care units (ICUs) and their organization in healthcare systems. However, ICU capacity and availability are ongoing ...concerns beyond the pandemic, particularly due to an aging population and increasing complexity of care. This study aimed to assess the current and future shortage of ICU physicians in France, ten years after a previous evaluation. A national e-survey was conducted among French ICUs in January 2022 to collect data on ICU characteristics, medical staffing, individual physician characteristics, and education and training capacities.
Results
Among 290 ICUs contacted, 242 responded (response rate: 83%), representing 4943 ICU beds. The survey revealed an overall of 300 full time equivalent (FTE) ICU physician vacancies in the country. Nearly two-thirds of the participating ICUs reported at least one physician vacancy and 35% relied on traveling physicians to cover shifts. The ICUs most affected by physician vacancies were the ICUs of non-university affiliated public hospitals. The retirements expected in the next five years represented around 10% of the workforce. The median number of physicians per ICU was 7.0, corresponding to a ratio of 0.36 physician (FTE) per ICU bed. In addition, 27% of ICUs were at risk of critical dysfunction or closure due to vacancies and impending retirements.
Conclusion
The findings highlight the urgent need to address the shortage of ICU physicians in France. Compared to a similar study conducted in 2012, the inadequacy between ICU physician supply and demand has increased, resulting in a higher number of vacancies. Our study suggests that, among others, increasing the number of ICM residents trained each year could be a crucial step in addressing this issue. Failure to take appropriate measures may lead to further closures of ICUs and increased risks to patients in this healthcare system.
For many patients, notably among elderly nursing home residents, no plans about end-of-life decisions and palliative care are made. Consequently, when these patients experience life-threatening ...events, decisions to withhold or withdraw life-support raise major challenges for emergency healthcare professionals. Emergency department premises are not designed for providing the psychological and technical components of end-of-life care. The continuous inflow of large numbers of patients leaves little time for detailed assessments, and emergency department staff often lack training in end-of-life issues. For prehospital medical teams (in France, the physician-staffed mobile emergency and intensive care units known as SMURs), implementing treatment withholding and withdrawal decisions that may have been made before the acute event is not the main focus. The challenge lies in circumventing the apparent contradiction between the need to make immediate decisions and the requirement to set up a complex treatment project that may lead to treatment withholding and/or withdrawal. Laws and recommendations are of little assistance for making treatment withholding and withdrawal decisions in the emergency setting. The French Intensive Care Society (
Société de Réanimation de Langue Française
, SRLF) and French Society of Emergency Medicine (
Société Française de Médecine d’Urgence
, SFMU) tasked a panel of emergency physicians and intensivists with developing a document to serve both as a position paper on life-support withholding and withdrawal in the emergency setting and as a guide for professionals providing emergency care. The task force based its work on the available legislation and recommendations and on a review of published studies.
Healthcare curricula need summative assessments relevant to and representative of clinical situations to best select and train learners. Simulation provides multiple benefits with a growing ...literature base proving its utility for training in a formative context. Advancing to the next step, "the use of simulation for summative assessment" requires rigorous and evidence-based development because any summative assessment is high stakes for participants, trainers, and programs. The first step of this process is to identify the baseline from which we can start.
First, using a modified nominal group technique, a task force of 34 panelists defined topics to clarify the why, how, what, when, and who for using simulation-based summative assessment (SBSA). Second, each topic was explored by a group of panelists based on state-of-the-art literature reviews technique with a snowball method to identify further references. Our goal was to identify current knowledge and potential recommendations for future directions. Results were cross-checked among groups and reviewed by an independent expert committee.
Seven topics were selected by the task force: "What can be assessed in simulation?", "Assessment tools for SBSA", "Consequences of undergoing the SBSA process", "Scenarios for SBSA", "Debriefing, video, and research for SBSA", "Trainers for SBSA", and "Implementation of SBSA in healthcare". Together, these seven explorations provide an overview of what is known and can be done with relative certainty, and what is unknown and probably needs further investigation. Based on this work, we highlighted the trustworthiness of different summative assessment-related conclusions, the remaining important problems and questions, and their consequences for participants and institutions of how SBSA is conducted.
Our results identified among the seven topics one area with robust evidence in the literature ("What can be assessed in simulation?"), three areas with evidence that require guidance by expert opinion ("Assessment tools for SBSA", "Scenarios for SBSA", "Implementation of SBSA in healthcare"), and three areas with weak or emerging evidence ("Consequences of undergoing the SBSA process", "Debriefing for SBSA", "Trainers for SBSA"). Using SBSA holds much promise, with increasing demand for this application. Due to the important stakes involved, it must be rigorously conducted and supervised. Guidelines for good practice should be formalized to help with conduct and implementation. We believe this baseline can direct future investigation and the development of guidelines.
Purpose: Survivors after acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are at high risk of developing respiratory sequelae and functional impairment. The ...healthcare crisis caused by the pandemic hit socially disadvantaged populations. We aimed to evaluate the influence of socio-economic status on respiratory sequelae after COVID-19 ARDS.Methods: We carried out a prospective multicenter study in 30 French intensive care units (ICUs), where ARDS survivors were pre-enrolled if they fulfilled the Berlin ARDS criteria. For patients receiving high flow oxygen therapy, a flow ≥ 50 l/min and an FiO2 ≥ 50% were required for enrollment. Socio-economic deprivation was defined by an EPICES (Evaluation de la Précarité et des Inégalités de santé dans les Centres d'Examens de Santé - Evaluation of Deprivation and Inequalities in Health Examination Centres) score ≥ 30.17 and patients were included if they performed the 6-month evaluation. The primary outcome was respiratory sequelae 6 months after ICU discharge, defined by at least one of the following criteria: forced vital capacity < 80% of theoretical value, diffusing capacity of the lung for carbon monoxide < 80% of theoretical value, oxygen desaturation during a 6-min walk test and fibrotic-like findings on chest computed tomography.Results: Among 401 analyzable patients, 160 (40%) were socio-economically deprived and 241 (60%) non-deprived; 319 (80%) patients had respiratory sequelae 6 months after ICU discharge (81% vs 78%, deprived vs non-deprived, respectively). No significant effect of socio-economic status was identified on lung sequelae (odds ratio (OR), 1.19 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.72-1.97), even after adjustment for age, sex, most invasive respiratory support, obesity, most severe P/F ratio (adjusted OR, 1.02 95% CI 0.57-1.83).Conclusions: In COVID-19 ARDS survivors, socio-economic status had no significant influence on respiratory sequelae 6 months after ICU discharge.
Identifying frailty in critically ill patients can help to guide management, including the selection of appropriate interventions and the development of care plans such as time-limited trials in ...patients with an unclear benefit from critical care. The FRAIL checklist assesses five domains of frailty: functional impairment, recurrent hospitalizations, advanced malignancy and chronic diseases, irreversible organ failure, and long hospital stay. The CFS but not the FRAIL checklist was independently associated with mortality in old ICU patients. ...we believe that in elderly ICU patients, CFS should be used to assess frailty because it also provides prognostic information.
Based on these considerations, Cheung et al. suggested 1) modifying FRAIL and automatically rating the "F" component as "positive" in patients with CFS > 4 in the data analysis which represents ...post-processing of the data obtained and 2) comparing the rates of TLTs in patients with CFS > 4 and FRAIL > 0. After adjusting for age, gender, SOFA score, and the decision to withdraw/withhold treatment, the modified-FRAIL > 0 was no longer associated with 90-day mortality (aHR 1.15 95% CI 0.80–1.62; p = 0.45), confirming previous data and in contrast to a robust multivariable association of CFS > 4 (aHR 1.80 95% CI 1.29–2.53; p = 0.001) with mortality. ...we recognise that the FRAIL checklist attempts to integrate pre-existing conditions and hospitalisations with functional impairment and believe that it is possible that such an approach could further improve frailty assessment.
Background
We investigated the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on mental health of professionals working in the intensive care unit (ICU) according to the intensity of the epidemic in France.
Methods
...This cross-sectional survey was conducted in 77 French hospitals from April 22 to May 13 2020. All ICU frontline healthcare workers were eligible. The primary endpoint was the mental health, assessed using the 12-item General Health Questionnaire. Sources of stress during the crisis were assessed using the Perceived Stressors in Intensive Care Units (PS-ICU) scale. Epidemic intensity was defined as high or low for each region based on publicly available data from Santé Publique France. Effects were assessed using linear mixed models, moderation and mediation analyses.
Results
In total, 2643 health professionals participated; 64.36% in high-intensity zones. Professionals in areas with greater epidemic intensity were at higher risk of mental health issues (
p
< 0.001), and higher levels of overall perceived stress (
p
< 0.001), compared to low-intensity zones. Factors associated with higher overall perceived stress were female sex (
B
= 0.13; 95% confidence interval CI = 0.08–0.17), having a relative at risk of COVID-19 (
B
= 0.14; 95%-CI = 0.09–0.18) and working in high-intensity zones (
B
= 0.11; 95%-CI = 0.02–0.20). Perceived stress mediated the impact of the crisis context on mental health (
B
= 0.23, 95%-CI = 0.05, 0.41) and the impact of stress on mental health was moderated by positive thinking,
b
= − 0.32, 95% CI = − 0.54, − 0.11.
Conclusion
COVID-19 negatively impacted the mental health of ICU professionals. Professionals working in zones where the epidemic was of high intensity were significantly more affected, with higher levels of perceived stress. This study is supported by a grant from the French Ministry of Health (PHRC-COVID 2020).
Introduction International guidelines include early nutritional support (≤48 hour after admission), 20–25 kcal/kg/day, and 1.2–2 g/kg/day protein at the acute phase of critical illness. Recent data ...challenge the appropriateness of providing standard amounts of calories and protein during acute critical illness. Restricting calorie and protein intakes seemed beneficial, suggesting a role for metabolic pathways such as autophagy, a potential key mechanism in safeguarding cellular integrity, notably in the muscle, during critical illness. However, the optimal calorie and protein supply at the acute phase of severe critical illness remains unknown. NUTRIREA-3 will be the first trial to compare standard calorie and protein feeding complying with guidelines to low-calorie low-protein feeding. We hypothesised that nutritional support with calorie and protein restriction during acute critical illness decreased day 90 mortality and/or dependency on intensive care unit (ICU) management in mechanically ventilated patients receiving vasoactive amine therapy for shock, compared with standard calorie and protein targets.Methods and analysis NUTRIREA-3 is a randomised, controlled, multicentre, open-label trial comparing two parallel groups of patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation and vasoactive amine therapy for shock and given early nutritional support according to one of two strategies: early calorie-protein restriction (6 kcal/kg/day-0.2–0.4 g/kg/day) or standard calorie-protein targets (25 kcal/kg/day, 1.0–1.3 g/kg/day) at the acute phase defined as the first 7 days in the ICU. We will include 3044 patients in 61 French ICUs. Two primary end-points will be evaluated: day 90 mortality and time to ICU discharge readiness. The trial will be considered positive if significant between-group differences are found for one or both alternative primary endpoints. Secondary outcomes include hospital-acquired infections and nutritional, clinical and functional outcomes.Ethics and dissemination The NUTRIREA-3 study has been approved by the appropriate ethics committee. Patients are included after informed consent. Results will be submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Trial registration number NCT03573739 .
Introduction Prognosis of patients with COVID-19 depends on the severity of the pulmonary affection. The most severe cases may progress to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which is ...associated with a risk of long-term repercussions on respiratory function and neuromuscular outcomes. The functional repercussions of severe forms of COVID-19 may have a major impact on quality of life, and impair the ability to return to work or exercise. Social inequalities in healthcare may influence prognosis, with socially vulnerable individuals more likely to develop severe forms of disease. We describe here the protocol for a prospective, multicentre study that aims to investigate the influence of social vulnerability on functional recovery in patients who were hospitalised in intensive care for ARDS caused by COVID-19. This study will also include an embedded qualitative study that aims to describe facilitators and barriers to compliance with rehabilitation, describe patients’ health practices and identify social representations of health, disease and care.Methods and analysis: The "Functional Recovery From Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) Due to COVID-19: Influence of Socio-Economic Status" (RECOVIDS) study is a mixed-methods, observational, multicentre cohort study performed during the routine follow-up of post-intensive care unit (ICU) functional recovery after ARDS. All patients admitted to a participating ICU for PCR-proven SARS-CoV-2 infection and who underwent chest CT scan at the initial phase AND who received respiratory support (mechanical or not) or high-flow nasal oxygen, AND had ARDS diagnosed by the Berlin criteria will be eligible. The primary outcome is the presence of lung sequelae at 6 months after ICU discharge, defined either by alterations on pulmonary function tests, oxygen desaturation during a standardised 6 min walk test or fibrosis-like pulmonary findings on chest CT. Patients will be considered to be socially disadvantaged if they have an "Evaluation de la Précarité et des Inégalités de santé dans les Centres d’Examen de Santé" (EPICES) score ≥30.17 at inclusion.Ethics and dissemination: The study protocol and the informed consent form were approved by an independent ethics committee (Comité de Protection des Personnes Sud Méditerranée II) on 10 July 2020 (2020-A02014-35). All patients will provide informed consent before participation. Findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at national and international congresses.Trial registration number NCT04556513
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