New2ICU - Checklists and Guides

Checklists

Checklists provide an invaluable way of ensuring all appropriate staff, equipment and drugs are available before certain critical procedures. Below we have included the key national checklists which new starters in ICU should be familiar with.

Guides

Displaced tracheostomy algorithms

A displaced tracheostomy algorithm was first devised by the New2ICU faculty in February 2009. Since then, there has been widespread recognition that an algorithm such as this can improve decision making and reduce cognitive burden on staff when faced with a tracheostomy emergency. The National Tracheostomy Safety Project (NTSP) has since published displaced tracheostomy algorithms which are available on their website here. We recognise that the NTSP algorithms are incredibly useful for staff from a wide variety of backgrounds, but in order to simplify the algorithms further and make them highly relevant only for staff who work on ICU, we have updated our algorithms, and these are illustrated below. Staff who work on ICUs should understand which algorithms their unit uses and refer to that in the interests of consistency. We have been teaching the algorithms below for over 15 years and have found that staff who are new to the ICU can learn, adopt and apply them quicky, so they are placed here for reference and adoption where appropriate.