Welcome to the South East Wales Critical Care Network

The South East Wales Critical Care Network was established in 2007 as a collaborative partnership bringing together clinical services to work together to promote the highest quality critical care services for the region.

Critical care is a vital hospital service and the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is the area where the sickest patients in hospital are treated. These desperately unwell patients may come from the general wards, both medical and surgical, the Accident and Emergency Department, or the operating theatres. The staff of the critical care unit use modern high-technology organ support to save patients’ lives. Critical Care services also provide a key role within the hospital to support the medical and surgical specialties in the early recognition of, and response to, acute illness in adults in hospital.

The main focus of the Network is adult critical care but links are being forged with specialised areas providing critical care including cancer, cardiac, neurosciences and renal and paediatric intensvie care.

The Network takes a whole system approach to ensuring the delivery of safe and effective services across the South East Wales health community in order to provide valuable expertise, advice and facilitation.

The South East Wales Critical Care Network will work closely with the Critical Care Networks in North Wales and Mid & West Wales and with other regional Networks (including Cancer, Cardiac and Renal) in order to identify and address issues which interface across clinical services regionally or nationally.

This site has been developed to share information across the region. Some of the content of this website may only accessible to NHS Critical Care staff through log in procedures.

The South East Wales region encompasses 3 Local Health Boards and 1 NHS Trust providing specialist cancer services.

This includes:-

Cardiff & Vale University LHB (University Hospital of Wales and Llandough Hospital)
Aneurin Bevan LHB (Royal Gwent and Nevill Hall Hospital)
Cwm Taff LHB (Royal Glamorgan and Prince Charles Hospital)
Velindre

South East Wales is the largest (in population terms) of the three NHS regions in Wales. The population was recorded at 1.408M in 2003 and is projected to rise to 1.462M by 2013 and reaching 1.539M by 2028. The population of South East Wales is ageing and this places particular pressures on the healthcare system.

The region is varied, characterised by:

A largely rural, sparsely populated Eastern area from the English border and Wye Valley across to the main road link between Newport and Abergavenny. Within these areas there are many small villages and two small towns: Chepstow and Monmouth.
The valley areas, from Cwmbran, Pontypool and Abergavenny to the Rhondda Valley, are characterised by a series of old mining valleys, running approximately north-south with poor east-west communications.
The coastal zone spans Newport and Cardiff which are thriving urban areas with high population density and higher levels of ethnic minorities than in the other two zones. Both are designated cities and are asylum seeker dispersal areas. Also more or less merged into this conurbation zone are the towns of Penarth and Barry and the rural Western Vale, all are part of the Vale of Glamorgan county.

Last updated: 22/10/2009