Follow-up services for improving long-term outcomes in intensive care unit (ICU) survivors.

CONCLUSIONS: We found insufficient evidence, from a limited number of studies, to determine whether ICU follow-up services are effective in identifying and addressing the unmet health needs of ICU survivors. We found five ongoing studies which are not included in this review; these ongoing studies may increase our certainty in the effect in future updates. Because of limited data, we were unable to explore whether one design of follow-up service is preferable to another, or whether a service is more effective for some people than others, and we anticipate that future studies may also vary in design. We propose that future studies are designed with robust methods (for example randomised studies are preferable) and consider only one variable (the follow-up service) compared to standard care; this would increase confidence that the effect is due to the follow-up service rather than concomitant therapies. PMID: 30388297 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Cochrane Database Syst Rev Source Type: research