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Recovering

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Intensive Care Unit: Wellington Hospital is the tertiary referral centre for the lower North Island and upper South Island of New Zealand. This gives it a catchment population of 350-400,000 and a geographic radius of 300kms. Wellington ’s ICU supports six public hospitals that have intensive care units and one hospital that doesn’t. To manage such a large area, they run a busy Flight Service. Wellington Hospital Intensive Care has 14 beds and is staffed to be a 12 bed tertiary general and cardiothoracic unit. They look after paediatrics, neurosurgical, trauma, cardiothoracic, vascular, renal, general medical and surgical patients. They don’t manage burns or plastics in the hospital nor spinal injuries. Wellington ICU treats about 1300 patients each year, 45% of these are elective and includes 500 cardiothoracic patients. The median length of stay for patients is 24 hours which reflects the high number of elective admissions. After this 25% stay for the second day, 21% for 2 to 7 days and 6% more than a week. My stay in both Wellington and Hutt Hospital ICU's was 11 days, a seriously long time. Bottom line, the nursing staff at both hospitals were fantastic, the doctors and consultants were not bad either, but really, those nurses, can't say enough good things about them, a massive thank you guys...

Sat alongside my CPAP (Continuous Positive Air Pressure) machine at Hutt Hospital ICU, only the Oxygen feed is on, to what is known as a Tracky Mask, running about 3 Litres of Oxygen. *

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I have pulled the tracky mask to one side so you can see the traky and the one way valve they fitted which made it easy for me to talk, at last! *

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Gallery: The Gallery on Halford

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