Neurosurgical Critical Care Center,Centers & Staff,CHINA-INI

Neurosurgical Critical Care Center

1. Team Introduction

The neurosurgical critical care center of Department of neurosurgery, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, was established in August 2003 with 16 beds. It is one of the earliest neurosurgical critical care centers in China. In December 2018, with the opening of the China-INI, the center expanded to 38 beds, with ward 1 located on the seventh floor of the China-INI building, and ward 2 on the fourth floor of the Surgery Building.

This highly specialized center is dedicated to caring for critically ill, neurologically impaired patients. The director is Professor Ning Wang, and attending physicians are Yueqiao Xu, and Xin Qu, each leading a team. Totally there are 9 full-time neurosurgical critical care physician and 71 nurses.

2. Specialized Diseases

This center mainly admit patients with severe cerebrovascular disease (both ischemic and hemorrhagic, especially aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage), traumatic brain injury, intracranial infection, perioperative period of complicated neurosurgeries, such as lesions at sella turcica, petroclival region, brain stem, and so on. And some are conscious-impaired patients with hydrocephalus and cranial defect who need treatment.

The management concept of this center is neuroprotection combined with multiple systemic organs support, to postpone or even avoid the secondary brain injury, and achieve better outcome. Temperature management and proper analgesia and sedation are usually applied for severely brain injured patients. Besides the widespread used tools in general ICU like bedside ultrasound, PICCOs, CVP, EtCO2 and hemodialysis, there are many neurological-specific instruments, like ICP (ventricular and parenchymal), TCD, EEG, NIRS, which comes as multimodality neurological monitoring for patients. Resulted from the joint effort of the NICU employees, about 2200 neurosurgical critical and perioperative patients were admitted in 2019.

3. Training Programs

There are two neurosurgical critical care training courses every year (half a year each), each can be divided into two parts: theoretical and practical, which are merged into everyday clinical work. Nearly 100 intensive doctors or neurosurgeons who are dedicated themselves to neurosurgical critical care have already finished the courses.