Is access to intensive care equitable?

Excerpt

Patients with life-threatening illness often require admission to intensive care units (ICUs) to receive life sustaining interventions. This is an expensive health care resource with specialized physical space, equipment and healthcare worker expertise. Due to constraints imposed by a limited resource, various guidelines for admission to the ICU have been proposed [1], including triage decisions if demand exceeds supply [2]. Institutions likely have their own more specific admission and discharge criteria for individual ICUs. These guidelines are subject to interpretation and, especially when combined with individual treatment decisions, introduce the possibility of subjectivity and bias. Whether such inequities in access to ICU care exist is not clearly known, or easy to study. …