Scoring Systems for the Patients of Intensive Care Unit

The patients being treated in intensive care unit (ICU) have considerably unstable clinical status and physiological capacity. Therefore, care services, backed by accurate clinical judgement, have a great impact on their recovery. Accurate clinical assessment can facilitate not only prognostic prediction and therapeutic decisionmaking, but also assessment and comparison of ICU performance or quality of critical care services. Among the measures of illness severity, mortality rate or survival rate is widely used because it is an easy to use, simple, and powerful tool. However, this measure cannot be used as performance indicator of ICU for comparison because it cannot be adjusted for patient severity in each ICU.