Primary and acute care
Intensive care expert witnesses
Listed intensive care expert witnesses address admission decisions, organ support, sedation, ventilation and the management of deterioration in critically ill patients. The evidence commonly concerns timing: when a change was recognised and what followed it.
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The evidence
What an intensive care expert witness is asked to determine
Critical care generates a dense and continuous record, including hourly charts, ventilator settings, blood gas results and infusion rates. That density allows a close reconstruction of the clinical course, and it also makes clear which decisions were taken with which information available.
- Whether referral to and admission for critical care occurred within an appropriate period.
- Whether ventilation, sedation and haemodynamic support were set and adjusted in line with the recorded parameters.
- Whether infection, bleeding or organ dysfunction was recognised and treated on the evidence available.
- Whether procedures such as line insertion, tracheostomy or transfer were performed and documented adequately.
- What can properly be said about the contribution of critical care to the eventual outcome.
Practitioners are listed across all four UK nations. Location can be narrowed in the register’s location listings before an instruction is made.
Claim contexts
Claims that instruct this discipline
These links describe the question intensive care evidence can answer. They do not prescribe the scope of an individual instruction.
Clinical negligence claims
Organ support, monitoring and escalation decisions during a critical care admission.
View claim type → 02Inquests
Critical care evidence where the circumstances of a death are being investigated.
View claim type → 03Brain injury claims
Hypoxic-ischaemic injury said to arise during critical illness.
View claim type →Search the register by the discipline used in the instruction.
See intensive care listingsReport routes
Reports prepared
The volume of critical care documentation usually justifies a records review report before any further evidence is commissioned. A breach and causation report then addresses the criticism and its consequence separately.
Anaesthetic, microbiology and neurological evidence frequently sits alongside a critical care opinion. The applicable requirements are held on the report pages.
Intensive care expert witness evidence
An intensivist expert witness reconstructs the critical care record hour by hour and states what the observations, settings and results support about the decisions taken.
Listings show the discipline and the areas covered, and enquiries go to the practitioner rather than the register. See the Intensive Care Society alongside the case material.
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