Intensive Care Unit (ICU)

Wellington Hospital is the tertiary referral centre for the lower North Island and upper South Island of New Zealand. This gives us a catchment population of approximately 1,000,000 and a geographic radius of 300kms. Wellington’s ICU supports six public hospitals that have intensive care units and one hospital that doesn’t. (See the Maps for more detail of the area.)

To manage such a large area, we run a busy Flight Service.

Wellington Hospital Intensive Care has 18 bedspaces and is resourced to 15 beds. We look after paediatrics, neurosurgical, trauma, cardiothoracic, vascular, renal, general medical and surgical patients. We don’t manage burns or plastics in our hospital nor spinal injuries.

New Zealand has one paediatric (child) intensive care unit in Auckland (700 kms north) called Starship Hospital . We manage most paediatrics (80-100 per year) but refer the very young and very difficult on to Starship.

Wellington ICU treats about 1300 patients each year, 40% of these are elective and includes 500 cardiothoracic patients. This gives us an average occupancy each morning of 12 patients with a range from 6 to 16. The median length of stay for patients is 28 hours which reflects the high number of elective admissions. After this 25% stay for the second day, 21% for 2 to 7 days and 6% more than a week. We ventilate 75% of admissions and have a mortality rate of approximately 10%.

This is a busy unit with a wide range of patients and severity of illnesses.