Intensive care has become very important in the management of critically ill children. The pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) is a part of the hospital where critically ill pediatric patients who require advanced airway, respiratory, and hemodynamic supports are usually admitted with the aim of achieving an outcome better than if the patients were admitted into other parts of the hospital. The care of critically ill children remains one of the most demanding and challenging aspects of the field of pediatrics. The main purpose of the PICU is to prevent mortality by intensively monitoring and treating critically ill children who are considered at high risk of mortality. This, however, comes at a huge cost to all the parties involved the hospital, the personnel, and the care givers of patients. It is usually only offered to patients whose condition is potentially reversible and who have a good chance of surviving with intensive care support. Since these patients are critically ill, the outcome of intervention is sometimes difficult to predict. In critical care medicine, intensive care unit (ICU) results can be assessed on the basis of outcomes such as death or survival by means of indicators such as mortality rates. Evaluation of the outcomes of medical interventions can assess the efficacy of treatment, making it possible to take better decisions, to further improve quality of care, to standardize conduct, and to ensure effective management of the high-level resources needed to deliver intensive care services thereby optimizing resource utilization. Although mortality in patients depends on many factors such as demographic and clinical characteristic of population, infrastructure and non-medical factors (management and organization), case mix, and admission practice, it is also affected by ICU performance.~The PICU concept was initially developed about 40 years ago with the first consensus conference on critical care admission held in 1983 by the National Institute of Health in the US The principle that emerged from this group continues to be relevant even today as it identifies patients who should be admitted to the PICU as those who reversible medical conditions with a reasonable prospect of substantial recovery Clinical diagnosis model based PICU admission criteria Cardiac conditions cardiogenic shock, myocardial dysfunction: infectious and other complex dysrhythmias requiring close monitoring and intervention, including new onset complete heart block and after cardioversion, acute congestive heart failure requiring hemodynamic support, hypertensive emergencies after cardiac arrest and post-resuscitation, aortic dissection congenital heart disease with cardiopulmonary instability patients presenting to the emergency department with cardiorespiratory or neurologic compromise after high risk intrathoracic or cardiac procedures, need for invasive cardiac monitoring, need for cardiac pacing, pericardial effusion requiring drainage, signs of tamponade ,hypertensive urgency.~Thus it is very important to have clear time sensitive goals in ICU management of these fragile infants and children to minimize mortality and neuromorbidity
Aim of the work:~To describe the clinical patterns criteria of infants and children with cardiac disease admitted to PICU and their outcome.