Each year, over 80,000 patients are being admitted to an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in the Netherlands. The ICU is a highly specialized care unit for patients with a wide range of life-threatening illnesses or injuries, such as sepsis, heart failure or trauma. An ICU admission is a serious event; even if patients survive, they often experience a decreased quality of life after discharge because they suffer from long-term and severe complaints.
Since 1996 the National Intensive Care Evaluation (NICE) Registry collects data concerning disease severity and outcomes of admissions to the adult ICUs of all Dutch hospitals, with the aim to monitor the quality of care and to improve it where needed. The NICE Research & Support (NICE R&S) team is responsible for processing these data and for controlling data quality. NICE R&S develops case-mix correction methods and audit- and feedback tools which can be used by hospitals for the optimization of the healthcare process by gaining insight into their own quality. Furthermore, NICE R&S assists ICUs in formulating and executing scientific and practical research questions.
More information on the NICE Registry (in Dutch) can be found here.