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University Hospital of Helsinki
Kuopio university Hospital
Oulu University Hospital
Hospital details
Name hospital: University Hospital of Helsinki, Cardiac Surgical Intensive Care Unit #21
Adress: PO Box 340
Postal code / City 00029 HUS
Country: Finland
Website hospital:
Language spoken on the unit
current/common language Finnish,
widely spoken Swedish and English
spoken by a few
Summary
Our unit is has 12 beds for mainly post-operative critical care of cardiac surgical patients and two isolation rooms mainly used for heart and lung transplant patients. Average length of stay has prolonged from 2,6 days in 2002 to 3,4 days in 2004, due to patients being sicker (average Euro score 5,6) and operations being more complex. Also the amount of non-elective, emergency surgery patients has increased being about 17 % of all of our patients. 20 % of the patients are over 75 years old. In 2004 we took care of 26 heart and lung transplant patients. Latest technology aids us in caring for our patients (e.g. VAD, Impella®, inhaled nitric oxide, patient information management system) There are 64 registered nurses’ positions in our unit, of which one nurse works as a patients’ liaison nurse meeting patients and families prior to surgery and afterwards as necessary. She holds weekly meetings with patients who will have heart surgery. Patients and families can also contact her by phone in the day time. One clinical nurse specialist works in the unit to help strengthen evidence based nursing and develop nursing care. Nine nurses have studied nursing science further after graduating and three nurses are presently doing their masters’ thesis (two in nursing science and one in adult education). We find education very important in our work. Our six month orientation program is quite extensive including two separate seminar days. We hold three full day continuous education seminars twice a year to enable every nurse to participate. Our nurses also have the opportunity to attend seminars and congresses outside our hospital and abroad. On the average each nurse participated in education 5,6 days last year. Our nursing care is being developed constantly. We have 25 response groups who are in charge of keeping everybody updated and educated in their area’s newest developments. We have our own data base of instructions, information and educational material available at each patient’s bedside. We use Critical Care Manager® program (CIMS) to plan, document and evaluate patient care. In the CIMS we have built structured documenting system which is based on FinNMDS, nursing scientific evidence and 15-D quality of life assessment tool. We are in the process of developing reports collected from the system to help in daily management, to assess the quality of nursing care, and to further develop it. Our nurses used the average of 6,0 days as “development” days in 2004. We appreciate nursing research very much. It shows as in the ability to do research projects as part of our work. For example, we have studied how our organization’s values come true in everyday nursing and how our nurses find the use of our own database. We have hosted foreign nurses from Great Britain and nursing students from Portugal and Spain. Some of our nurses have worked abroad in different countries.
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Hospital details
Name hospital: Kuopio university Hospital
Adress: PL 1777
Postal code / City 70211 Kuopio
Country: Finland
Website hospital: www.kuh.fi
Language spoken on the unit
current/common language Finnish
widely spoken English and Swedish
spoken by a few German and Norwegian
Summary
Kuopio is the largest town in eastern Finland with over 100 000 inhabitants. Kuopio is situated about 400 kilometres north from the capital, Helsinki.  Kuopio is surrounded by Lake Kallavesi. More than one third of the town's area is water. It offers natural beauty to enjoy both winter and summer. You can enjoy all four seasons in Kuopio; midnight sun summer nights, the colourful leaves of autumn, a frosty winter and the shimmering crusted snow of early spring. July is the warmest month of the year and the coldest one is usually January. Among the five university hospitals and the providers of specialist health care services in Finland, Kuopio University Hospital (KUH) is one of the largest and one of the most versatile in its field. Approximately 4000 health care professionals provide the services offered by this hospital of about 800 beds. Nursing staff totals about 1600. KUH operates mainly in its region of particular responsibility, namely eastern and central Finland, the population of which is nearly one million.   The intensive care unit has 23 beds, 8 of them in a post operative unit. The four-bed- neurological care unit is also situated in the intensive care unit. The best possible care is provided by a highly trained staff. There are about 90 health care professionals working in the ICU. Staff includes 3 physicians, a ward sister, 2 assistant ward sisters, 69 staff nurses and 12 nursing auxiliaries, 3 ward receptionists, 2 staff members who look after equipment maintenance and others. Staff is well-motivated, enthusiastic and supporting. A high level of nursing care is provided by using the latest equipment. Today, specialist services at the Intensive Care Unit of Kuopio University Hospital include open heart surgery, specialised cardiology, plastic surgery, treatment of severe burns and neurosciences, i.e. neuro-surgery and neurology.

Kuopio plays host to a number of annual international events, ranging from dance and wine festivals to various winter sports events, including Nordic skiing, ski-jumping and ice-skating. There are several outdoor sports to enjoy no matter what season it is. The spas provide an invigorating experience in winter. Summer time you can swim in almost any lake You find near Kuopio. The natural environment of the Kuopio area is unpolluted and the atmosphere both pleasant and safe.
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Hospital details
Name hospital: Oulu University Hospital
Adress: Kajaanintie 50
Postal code / City 90029 OYS
Country: Finland
Website hospital: www.ppshp.fi
Language spoken on the unit Finnish
current/common language English and Swedish
widely spoken Norwegian and German
spoken by a few English
Summary
The city of Oulu was founded  400 years ago in 1605 at the mouth of the Oulu River. Oulu is located on the northern part of the Baltic Sea and has been the provincial capital since 1776.Oulu is considered one northern Europe’s most significant centres of competence for example, in the area of high technology. Finland’s second largest university and many public and private research institutes are located in Oulu. The region is well known for its rapidly growing high technology industries with globally selling products. More information about Oulu can be found at the following internet address: http://www.ouka.fi/. Oulu University Hospital is part of the Northern Ostrobothnia Hospital District (NOHD), which is the northernmost of five university hospital units in Finland.  NOHD caters to clients coming from a vast geographical area with a population over 722 000. Oulu University Hospital provides advanced specialised medical treatment. The hospital has five intensive care units (ICU) in total.  Our Post-Operative ICU is under the administration of the Department of Anaesthesiology. This ICU attends mainly to patients who have undergone open heart surgery, neuro-surgical, trauma as well as obstetric emergencies. This ICU also responds to all adult resuscitation alerts within the hospital. ICU tended to approximately 1400 patients in 2003. The average time of stay is two days. The ICU has 10 beds fully equipped with monitors for telemetry. Our medical and nursing staff consist of  one anaesthesiologist (specialist doctor), one assistant physician, one head nurse, one assistant head nurse, 38 registered nurses, four auxiliary nurses and five ancillary staff. The nursing staff is rotation based working in three shifts. Our nurse to patient ratio is 1:1 or 1:2. We implement a patient centred nursing approach to patient care and emphasise multidisciplinary teamwork in care delivery.  Computerised patient databases have been in use in our ICU since the mid ’90s. All patient data is collected via a commercial computerised data system. We have taken part in the development of the new Intensive Care Nursing Scoring System (ICNSS) and it is currently in use in our ICU. The following data collection and patient scoring systems are in use in our ICU; admission scores of the Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation (APACHE II), Simplified Acute Physiology Scores II (SAPS II), daily Therapeutic Intervention Scores (TISS) as well as the Higgins-Cleveland System.

We take part in numerous continuing research projects. One of the most recent is the follow-up of quality of life of patients who have been admitted into our ICU for over five days.
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