Mead Johnson Critical Care Symposium for the Practising Surgeon. 1. Transport of critically ill adult patients.

Interhospital transportation of critically ill patients over long distances is common in the tiered health care systems of North America. The authors describe their 1-year experience with a physician-assisted transport system, operating out of the surgical intensive care unit at the Toronto General Hospital. The application of a well-known severity of illness measure (therapeutic intervention scoring system) allowed them to correlate severity of illness, as assessed over the telephone before patient transfer, with eventual outcome after admission to the surgical intensive care unit. Their analysis of 107 critically ill patients transported by this system led them to conclude that the system is reliable and is associated with acceptable morbidity and mortality.