Paediatric Intensive Care Unit

Our paediatric intensive care unit cares for children up to 18 years of age, whose illness or injury has become life-threatening. A paediatric intensivist leads the care, working with specially trained children's nurses, and the equipment and medicine doses will be age appropriate. Sometimes, when the children start deteriorating, it is very important to support them in the early stages of illness to prevent them deteriorating further. Families stay close to their child throughout.

What is a paediatric intensive care unit?

A paediatric intensive care unit, or PICU, is a specialist unit for children who are seriously ill or at risk of rapid deterioration and need early interventions, close monitoring and organ support. PICU looks after infants beyond the newborn period, children and teenagers, with problems such as severe breathing difficulty, serious infections, neurological illnesses, gastro-intestinal and hormonal problems besides children needing complicated, prolonged surgeries awaiting recovery in the post-operative period after major surgery. Newborn babies go to the neonatal unit, and adults to adult intensive care. Care is built around the whole family, and support steps down as a child recovers.

Which children are cared for in the PICU?

Children reach the PICU by many routes. Often, they are referred by physicians caring for them on the clinics, emergency medical units as well as from children’s wards. Once Clinicians sense that the child is deteriorating despite the treatment offered, they would like the sick child to be transferred to PICU. They may need this level of care:

• Severe pneumonias
• After major or complex surgery
• With a serious infection or sepsis
• With severe breathing difficulty or lung failure
• With severe asthma
• When the heart, kidneys or other organs are failing
• Meningitis or encephalitis ( brain fever) resulting in prolonged seizures
• After a serious injury or accident
• A metabolic problem such as Diabetic ketoacidosis

Some admissions are planned, for example after scheduled surgery. Others happen suddenly, when a child becomes critically unwell on a ward, in the emergency department or at another hospital. A specialist transport team can bring them in. Wherever they come from, these children need the constant monitoring and support that a general ward cannot provide, and the paediatric team decides when that level of care is needed. Referral at the “right time” is extremely important in preventing further deterioration and supporting the children.

What to expect

When your child arrives, the team connects monitors that follow their heart rate, breathing, blood pressure and oxygen levels. A nurse stays close, often caring for just one or two children, while a paediatric intensivist reviews your child through the day and night. Support is matched to what your child needs, whether that's a breathing machine or fluids and medicines to steady the breathing suport and the circulation. You can stay near your child, and the nurses will work together with you to comfort and help them.

Treatment changes day by day ( sometimes hour by hour) as your child responds. As they improve, the team eases back the support, perhaps swapping a ventilator for gentler oxygen, and plans a step down to a high-dependency bed or the children's ward. Some children need this care for a day or two, others for longer as they recover. The intensivist explains what's happening and what comes next, and you're part of those conversations.

Paediatric intensive care at Mediclinic

At Mediclinic City Hospital in Dubai, our paediatric intensive care unit provides the intensive care support around the clock, every day of the year. Beds are set aside for critically ill children, and an internationally trained team of paediatric intensivists, specialists, hospitalists and paediatric intensive care nurses look after them. Our unit cares for children referred from different hospitals in Dubai and also children transferred internationally. When a child's illness reaches into another field, we consult our paediatric subspecialists, among them cardiologists, pulmonologists, infectious disease specialists, Hemato-oncologists, Nephrologists and neurologists and work together as a multi-disciplinary team.