Intensive care is usually provided in a specialized unit of a hospital called the intensive care unit (ICU) or critical care unit (CCU). Many hospitals also have designated intensive care areas for certain specialities of medicine.[9] The naming is not rigidly standardized, and types of units are dictated by the needs and available resources of each hospital. These include:

• coronary intensive care unit (CCU or sometimes CICU) for heart disease
• medical intensive care unit (MICU)
• surgical intensive care unit (SICU)
• pediatric intensive care unit (PICU)
• neuroscience critical care unit (NCCU)
• overnight intensive-recovery (OIR)
• shock/trauma intensive-care unit (STICU)
• neonatal intensive care unit (NICU)
• ICU in the emergency department (E-ICU)

Medical studies suggest a relation between ICU volume and quality of care for mechanically ventilated patients. After adjustment for severity of illness, demographic variables, and characteristics of the ICUs (including staffing by intensivists), higher ICU volume was significantly associated with lower ICU and hospital mortality rates. For example, adjusted ICU mortality (for a patient at average predicted risk for ICU death) was 21.2% in hospitals with 87 to 150 mechanically ventilated patients annually, and 14.5% in hospitals with 401 to 617 mechanically ventilated patients annually.

Hospitals with intermediate numbers of patients had outcomes between these extremes. ICU delirium, formerly and inaccurately referred to as ICU psychosis, is a syndrome common in intensive care and cardiac units where patients who are in unfamiliar, monotonous surroundings develop symptoms of delirium (Maxmen & Ward, 1995). This may include interpreting machine noises as human voices, seeing walls quiver, or hallucinating that someone is tapping them on the shoulder. There exists systematic reviews in which interventions of sleep promotion related outcomes in the ICU have proven impactful in the overall health of patients in the ICU.

The English nurse Florence Nightingale pioneered efforts to use a separate hospital area for critically injured patients. During the Crimean War in the 1850s, she introduced the practice of moving the sickest patients to the beds directly opposite the nursing station on each ward so that they could be monitored more closely. In 1923, the American neurosurgeon Walter Dandy created a three-bed unit at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In these units, specially trained nurses cared for critically ill postoperative neurosurgical patients.

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