ABSTRACT
Since hospital patients today are typically older and sicker, and since ICU technology enables many of them to be maintained on a variety of machines indefinitely, the burden on nurses, partly reflected in the nursing shortage, is severe. This additional pressure concerning human resources-the inadequate number of nurses-contributes to a high number of deaths of patients whose care is provided on the normal wards, but who would have benefited had they been admitted to or had they remained in the ICU, which in the average US hospital is running at 100 per cent capacity virtually all the time. However, the question remains whether or not all of these beds have been appropriately filled, i.e. whether the patients truly benefit from ICU care.
