Our facilities

The Cardiac Intensive Care Unit is a state-of-the-art facility designed and built for the care of seriously ill patients, and to minimise the risk of infection wherever possible.

It is part of Southampton General Hospital's £60m North Wing, opened in 2007, which houses the Wessex Cardiac Unit.

Cardiac ICU is split into two sections – pink and blue, each with eight beds.

The décor is bright and colourful, with floor to ceiling walls. Beds are well spaced, and equipment around each bed is raised off the ground by movable metal arms. This reduces clutter, creates a bigger working area for the nurses and makes it easier to clean around each bed.

Nurses have work stations beside each bed, with a central nurses' station holding most of the unit's IT equipment.

Each section has:

• Five open plan beds
• Three side/single rooms for patients
• Two gowning-up lobbies, where doctors and nurses change their clothing to prevent infection
• A central nurses station
• A relatives' waiting room
• A quiet room where relatives can go to be on their own or chat to a doctor
• A visitor toilet

The unit has been specially designed with a central equipment store, containing stock such as IV feeding tubes, patient care material and technical equipment.

Alongside this, the unit also benefits from:

• A cardiac laboratory, which will carry out all the Cardiac ICU blood tests on site. This improves the unit's efficiency and the speeds up patient diagnosis.
• A blood storage unit, which can be used to temporarily store blood before a transfusion. This speeds up treatment of the patient – with blood already on site, staff do not have to wait for blood to be transported from a separate unit.
• Close proximity to the cardiac catheter labs and operating theatres. A lift links Cardiac ICU directly to the upstairs labs and theatres, meaning patients do not have to be wheeled through corridors. It creates a self-contained cardiac treatment unit for the benefit of patients.