Critical Care
Our critical care service offers care for those patients that benefit from intensive monitoring and expedient therapy. Critical care is tailored for those patients with a life-threatening illness. Our critical care team coordinates total patient care by ensuring appropriate treatment for all organ systems. Critical care therapies are commonly a continued variation of those started by your veterinarian or our emergency or specialty services.
In addition to taking care of those with a life-threatening illness, critical care medicine also encompasses care provided to those patients that may have the potential for life-threatening complications. With the prolonged hospital stays that are required for many critically ill patients to heal, comes an increased risk for complications. Although it is impossible to avoid every complication in every patient, complications can be minimized through detailed, strategic care. A few strategies that are emphasized in our intensive care unit (ICU) are hand hygiene (see link below) and limited phlebotomies.
VSEC offers the only private practice critical care service in all of Madison with a Board Certified critical care specialist. Why do you care? It has been shown in human medicine studies that when care is provided under the guidance of a criticalist (or intensivist) that overall patient mortality decreases and hospital length of stay is shortened by 30%. Intensivist driven critical care improves the coordination and continuity of care that your pet receives. Our critical care unit delivers the same level of care that you would expect for your family.
Critical Care
- Anesthesia and analgesia for the critically ill
- Cardiovascular critical care
- Fluid therapy for the critically ill
- Hand hygiene
- Hematological critical care
- Monitoring of the critically ill
- Neurological critical care
- Nutritional critical care
- Peritonitis care
- Phlebotomies, limited
- Renal failure critical care
- Respiratory critical care
- Sepsis care
- Ultrasound evaluations
- Endoscopic procedures