ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the challenges of operational intensive care and the extraordinary clinical advances made possible in a quarter of the twenty-first century. Since the first embryonic intensive care was deployed on operations to the Balkans in the late 1990s, the capability of deployed intensive care has grown. Overlapping conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved the unfortunate catalyst for much of the improvement in capability. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have raised important questions about the provision of deployed intensive care in austere environments. The chapter details the expansion of deployed intensive care in the UK Armed Forces. Civilian intensive care medicine was being increasingly recognised as a specialty in its own right. This led to a greater tendency to take the specialist qualifications and experience of nursing and medical staff into account when planning deployments. The chapter ends with a discussion of the political, doctrinal and clinical challenges for providing future deployed intensive care capability to Defence.
