Description
Intensive Care Units (ICUs) treat critically ill patients, many of whom will either be admitted there with nosocomial infection or will acquire it during their sojourn on the Unit. Such patients will usually have had previous antibiotics, sometimes multiple courses. The bacteria that cause nosocomial infections in ICU patients, and those that colonise these patients, are frequently resistant to many antibiotics, the result of selection by the previous use of antibiotics. The names of many of these microbes are often unfamiliar to ICU clinicians. The basic principles of the management of bacterial infection remain unchanged. This article outlines these principles, and emphasises the need for short courses of antibiotics and above all for clinicians to accept the limitations of these agents in the context of nosocomial infections.
