Emergency care: If you are experiencing a life-threatening emergency, please continue to call 999 as normal.
Hospital appointments: Patients should continue to attend planned appointments unless contacted directly by their care team.
Non-emergency care: If you need urgent medical advice but it is not a life-threatening emergency, please continue to use NHS 111.
Contacting our services: Some email communications and online services may be affected. If your enquiry is urgent, please contact the relevant service by telephone rather than email where possible.
Our general Intensive Care Unit cares for patients who have, or are at risk of, developing a critical illness or condition.
Our aim is to provide a high standard of care, support, and information, for patients and their families. The unit is staffed 24 hours a day by a dedicated multi-professional team, and comprises of single patient rooms for dignified patient care.
Our philosophy of care is to:
Provide the highest level of holistic evidence based care by competent multi-professional staff to all patients, their families, and carers.
We aim to restore health whenever possible and where not, to minimise distress and suffering to patients, their families, and carers. We take into account people’s cultures and will always be respectful of their ethnical and religious beliefs.
Visiting
We operate an open visiting policy, enabling visitors to visit 24 hours a day. For the safety of the patient, the number of visitors who are allowed around a bedside is 2 per patient at any one time. There may be times when visitors are asked to leave for the privacy of patients during emergencies and routine procedures or ward rounds.
Parents of very young children should discuss with the nurse in charge prior to entry to the unit due to potential exposure of infections. Depending on the infection risk, all visitors are advised to speak to the named nurse or the nurse in charge as to which protective measures they need to use e.g. wearing mask, apron and gloves. Parents should be aware of their children entering an environment that may be distressing and to use their own discretion.
Staying in contact
Family members and friends are encouraged to phone the unit whenever they feel the need to. However, we are unable to give out medical information over the phone to everybody. It can be useful if one member of the family phones for an update and then informs others concerned.
