The Department consists of 3 divisions: the Division of Anesthesiology, the Division of Intensive Care Medicine and the Division of Cardiovascular Anesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine. The employees of the Department also work in the Anesthesiology Outpatient Clinic within the Outpatient Clinic.
Every year, more than 12,500 patients are anesthetized by the Department’s staff and more than 2,100 patients are treated in the Intensive Care Units.
Patients undergoing anesthesia in the Department are preoperatively assessed in the Anesthesiology Outpatient Clinic within the hospital’s Outpatient Clinic while the Pain Clinic provides consultative services for postoperative pain management, which is available to all patients treated at the Dubrava University Hospital, especially to patients suffering from malignant diseases.
The staff of the department were among the first in our country to carry out some therapeutic and diagnostic procedures that have become highly differentiated in clinical practice: continuous renal replacement therapy in the intensive care unit, intra-aortic balloon pump, left and right mechanical cardiac support, transesophageal ultrasound, transesophageal measurement of cardiac output, right heart catheterization, hemodynamic monitoring of response to potent and selective vasoactive drugs, monitoring of respiratory function using electrical impedance tomography, percutaneous placement of filters in the inferior vena cava, anesthesia and postoperative care for deep hypothermia and circulatory arrest in cardiac and neurosurgical patients. In addition to these diagnostic and therapeutic modalities, the clinic’s staff specialize in numerous specific anesthetic procedures, including anesthesia for neonates with congenital anomalies, anesthesia for mechanical circulatory support implantation and cardiac transplantation, anesthesia for functional neurosurgery, maxillofacial and thoracic surgery, and various modalities of regional anesthesia as isolated anesthesia or adjunctive analgesia for general anesthesia. The Department is equipped with all necessary state-of-the-art medical and technical equipment for performing anesthesia and intensive care for the most critically ill patients. It is actively involved in the organ transplantation program led by the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Croatia, and in terms of the number and outcome of treatments, it is among the leading institutions in Croatia.
The Department is the Reference Center of the Ministry of Health for Hemodynamic Monitoring in the Intensive Care of Surgical Patients.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, with the establishment of the Primary Respiratory-Intensive Care Center (PRIC), all staff was actively involved in the work of the Intensive Care Center (IC), where the most severely ill patients were treated. Over 2,000 patients were treated in the IC’s 6 intensive care units with a maximum capacity of 85 intensive care beds.
