Critical Care - Pediatric
Seeing your child suffer from a critical illness is devastating for any parent. The team at Kentucky Children’s Hospital will not let you face this journey alone.
Our pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) specialists are dedicated to providing the care and support your family needs if your child experiences a life-threatening acute illness, injury or organ failure. Our team treats and monitors children ages newborn through 18 years, addressing a spectrum of serious issues, including burns, cardiovascular conditions, neurological conditions and trauma injuries.
Our multidisciplinary team includes pediatric intensive care physicians, as well as a nutritionist, nurses, pharmacists, respiratory therapists and subspecialists as needed, as well as full-time coverage from advanced practice nurses. Together, they stabilize critically ill patients recovering from surgery, serious injury or illness to encourage positive outcomes.
The pediatric intensivists at Kentucky Children’s Hospital specialize in providing critical care medicine in our PICU and the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU).
Dedicated Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit
The separate, four-bed CICU opened on December 2018 and is adjacent to the PICU. Clinicians providing care in this unit focus on a complete spectrum of care for patients with congenital heart disease and rhythm disturbances. Specialists in this unit include:
- Cardiologists
- Cardiovascular and thoracic surgeons
- CICU physicians
- Pediatric electrophysiologist
- Together, members of this clinical team:
- Medically manage seriously ill pediatric cardiac patients
- Provide critical care following cardiac surgery
- Offer anesthetic support, including pain management, for non-surgical procedures
Our Specialties and Services
The Kentucky Children’s Hospital PICU is equipped with:
- Sophisticated technology necessary to provide life support and monitoring to your child in the event of a serious illness, injury or organ failure
- Sedation service so your child can sleep through procedures or tests that can be painful or stressful
Using these valuable resources, our PICU team is able to provide care to address a variety of pediatric challenges, including:
- Acute respiratory failure
- Multi-system organ failure
- Multi-system trauma
- Neurological trauma and failure
- Poisoning
- Post-operative management
- Sepsis syndrome
Why Choose UK HealthCare for Pediatric Critical Care?
Kentucky Children’s Hospital is the subspecialty regional referral and pediatric care center for central and eastern Kentucky, which means our providers diagnose and treat a wide variety of conditions, both minor and life-threatening. Each year, more than 1,600 patients are admitted to our PICU and NICU, where they receive dedicated care from our team of critical care specialists and physician specialists.
The families of children in intensive care have access to several options for their own comfort during their child’s care. Four sleep rooms are available for parents, and a Ronald McDonald Family room is on-site and open 24 hours a day to allow families to relax and have a snack or a cup of coffee, all while just down the hall from their children.
