A new intensive care worksheet.

This article presents a new manual daily worksheet for recording data on a patient's status in an Intensive Care Unit. It permits a rapid view of the whole picture of the patient's condition at a certain hour since the system of recording is based on the time an event happened. Only one single page is used for each day. Space is provided for essential data, ventilatory parameters, laboratory results, fluid balance, drug therapy and special treatments. Attended staff, invited consultants as well as nurses add written notes which complete the picture provided by numbers. It does not replace the computerized interpretation, statistical analysis or storage of data, but it comes as an easy-to-use daily tool at the bedside.