Some Observations on Intensive Therapy Monitoring

The care of the critically ill patient depends first and foremost on repeated clinical evaluation by knowledgeable medical attendants and nurses. This clinical evaluation must, however, be supplemented by a variety of monitoring procedures if optimum care is to be maintained. Some monitoring techniques are complex, costly and invasive, and the additional information they provide may not be very great; it is thus imperative that clear indications for these procedures be defined if wastage of money and manpower is to be avoided and the risk of patient injury minimized. In this article several monitoring techniques concerned with central vascular volume arc discussed in the hope of providing guide‐lines for their use and of stimulating further interest in this problem.