Improving Mortality Prediction in Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Units

The intensive care unit provides continuous surveillance and highly specialized care for the sickest hospitalized patients. It is a high cost service and an assessment of its performance is necessary to optimize quality of care while minimizing costs. This research has developed a set of novel prognostic systems to predict hospital mortality in critically ill adults in Australasia for the purpose of monitoring and evaluating intensive care services. The Australian and New Zealand Risk of Death model contained in this thesis has significantly improved casemix adjustment and facilitated more accurate benchmarking of intensive care performance throughout Australia and New Zealand.