85 ICU Research Topics & Essay Samples

🔝 Top-10 Critical Care Research Topics

1. Intensive Care & Critical Care Skills in Nursing
2. Role of Nurse Practitioners in Acute and Intensive Care
3. Palliative Care in Intensive Care Unit
4. The Nurse Manager’s Role in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit
5. The Nursing Workflow in the Intensive Care Unit
6. Why Intensive Care Unit Nurses Have Low Work Morale
7. Actors Influencing How Intensive Care Unit Nurses Allocate Their Time Show Less
8. Confusion Assessment Method in Intensive Care Unit
9. Use of BIS Brain Monitors in Intensive Care Unit
10. Nosocomial Infections in Intensive Care Units

🔥 Hottest ICU Research Topics to Write About

Early Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Therapy

The neonatal intensive care unit therapy aims to provide care to ill or premature newborns. The NICU team is generally multidisciplinary and includes professionals from different departments ready to save newborns in the first days of their lives. Besides, the NICU offers emotional support to the families and helps them get through the challenging experience of having a newborn in intensive care.

Burnout of Critical Care Nurses: The Cost of Caring

Critical care nurses provide compassionate care to patients who experience life-threatening events, but they often forget to take care of themselves. As a result, they may experience burnout and compassion fatigue. Nurses become very irritable and have poor concentration, headaches, diarrhea, or sleep disturbances, which reduce their work quality.

Capacity Planning for Intensive Care Units

Poor patient flow management in ICUs causes service rejections and presents significant challenges, especially during crises like pandemics. That is where capacity planning comes in handy. It helps forecast critical care resource availability and optimize bed allocation, staffing levels, and medical equipment to meet patient demand.

Invasive Neuro Intervention Care after Surgery

Immediately after neurosurgery, the primary goal of care is to detect and prevent neurological deterioration and support systemic and neurological homeostasis. During this period, nurses trained in neurosurgical and neurocritical care procedures carefully observe patients. They manage the airway, control blood pressure, feed patients, and administer all the necessary medications.

The Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and Elements of Family-Centered Care

PICU often uses a family-centered approach to meet young patients’ emotional, psychological, and informational needs. Its fundamental elements are open communication, family participation in decision-making, and a supportive environment. These components enable collaboration between healthcare professionals, families, and sick children.

🏆 Best Intensive Care Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

1. Hiring New Registered Nurses for Intensive Care Unit
   The purpose of this paper is to outline methods for analyzing the ICU job, drafting the job description, and future changes that may affect the future of the job description.
2. Intensive Care Units Standards and Services
   Thus, in the cases of unplanned extubation, both self and accidental, the quality of care is observed through the nurse’s ability to react according to an incidence, with emphasis on the patient’s safety and the […]
3. Comfort Care of the Patient in Intensive Care
   The relationship between nurses’ comforting interventions and the patients’ comfort is the foundation of the theory. The purpose of the comfort theory is to establish the link between nursing interventions and patients’ comfort.
4. Resuscitation of Patients in Intensive Care Units
   The project utilizes a quasi-experimental design to choose the sample and manipulate the independent variable, the nursing training program of capnography use during CPR, to influence the dependent variable, the number of CPR cases with […]
5. Public Health: The Intensive Care Units
   To achieve this, the program will transform the work culture within the ICU to be more rigorous and goal oriented. It is important that all of the hospital critical-care stakeholders to distinguish and enforce imperative […]
6. Nurse Staffing, Medical Staffing and Mortality in Intensive Care
   In order to discuss the contribution of different types of personnel to the survival of patients in ICUs, the researchers provided different hypotheses for the relationship between the number of nurses and rates of patient […]
7. Clinical Personal Experience in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit
   I had the opportunity to provide adequate care and patient support in the ICU. Such leadership styles are applicable in health care organizations to promote the quality of care provided to patients.
8. Ethics Review: ‘Living Wills’ and Intensive Care
   However, some opponents of the move to legalize advance decisions in England and Wales are of the idea that legalizing advance decisions will be tantamount to euthanizing the patients illegally.
9. Having Visiting Hours in the Intensive Care Unit
   A family member selected to visit the patient will be in position to give feedback concerning the patient to the rest of the family members and friends.
10. Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants in the Intensive Care Unit
    Kleinpell and Robert Grabenkort, the authors of the article under consideration, tell that nursing practitioners and physician assistants play a very important role in the intensive care unit, however, their participation is still not well […]
11. Early Mobilization Therapy in Intensive Care Unit
    I believe that exactly this study approach has the greatest potential to answer my research question as it will allow me to assess the impact of both alternative methods and make conclusions having compared numerical […]
12. Intensive Care Unit Nurses’ Education Needs
    The reason for choosing this target group is the affiliation of the researcher: since the researcher is a nurse who works in the ICU of KFH, the analysis of the educational needs of the nurses […]
13. Medication Errors in Intensive Care Unit
    The majority of medication errors take place at the stage of administration; however, mistakes also occur during prescription, preparation of medication, and transcription.
14. Cross-Training in Intensive Care Unit
    The students who took this course will exhibit the mastery of: Assessment of the need for care under time constraints and in adverse conditions; Provision of assistance to critically ill individuals with precision, speed, and […]
15. Constructive Alignment in Intensive Care Nursing Education
    Given the potential benefits of CA for education, CA needs to be considered in terms of ICU nurse training to determine if it applies to the settings of ICU.
16. Evidence-Based Practice in the Intensive Care Unit
    The purpose of this paper is to identify challenges that are associated with the implementation of an evidence-based approach in a clinical environment and describe strategies that can be used for implementing this approach.
17. Bloodstream Infections in Intensive Care Department
    The scope of the essay is limited to the discussion of the risks of contract in infectious diseases, which nurses may face in the context of the ICU environment in a hospital.
18. Management of Burns in Intensive and Acute Care
    The article can be viewed as the review of the currently used practices to cope with burns in intensive care units, and the author describes procedures that are necessary in order to provide the respiratory […]
19. Early Mobility Therapy in the Intensive Care Unit
    Particularly, the advantages and the disadvantages of the early mobility therapy compared to the non-early mobility therapy for patients who are in intensive care will be analyzed.
20. Implementation of Physical Restraints in the Intensive Care Unit
    Once the tool determines the total number of FTEs needed for the ICU patients, they will be distributed throughout the day according to the trends of the patient volume.

🏥 ICU Evidence-Based Practice Topics

In an essay on this topic, you should discuss the benefits and challenges of using evidence-based practices in ICU care. Analyze how they can improve patient outcomes, reduce mortality rates, and shorten hospital stays.

Here are some other topics you can explore:

1. High-Flow Nasal Oxygen Therapy in ICU Patients: Benefits and Risks.
2. Best Practices for Pain Assessment in Children in ICU.
3. Airway Management in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation.
4. How Does Early Mobilization Impact Recovery Outcomes for ICU Patients?
5. The Benefits of the Tele-Icu During the COVID-19 Pandemic

👍 Good Essay Topics on Intensive Care

1. Pain Management at a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
2. Safety Score Improvement Plan For By-Faith Intensive Care Unit (ICU)
3. Seizure Detection in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit
4. The Association Between Brain Volumes and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Intensive Care Unit
5. Measuring Parent Satisfaction With Care in Neonatal Intensive Care Units
6. Nurse Burnout and Stress in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
7. Care for Critical Ill Patients With COVID-19 in Intensive Care Unit
8. Early Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Therapy
9. Implementation of an Intensive Care Unit Pharmaceutical Care Model
10. Premature Triplets: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Cook
11. Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy in the Intensive Care Unit
12. The Nature of Caring Work in an Intensive Care Unit
13. Intensive Care Admission and Early Neuro-Rehabilitation
14. Alarm Problems Going Off in the Intensive Care Unit
15. Patients With Traumatic Brain Injury Admitted to the Ward or Intensive Care Unit
16. Stress and Burnout of Nurses in the Intensive Care Unit
17. Pain-Related Stress During the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Stay
18. Expert and Competent Non-expert Visual Cues During Simulated Diagnosis in Intensive Care
19. Preventing Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia in the Intensive Care Unit
20. Intensive Care Nurses’ Views and Practices on Eye Care

💊 ICU Nursing Project Ideas: Pain Management Strategies

You can carry out a project to determine the most effective pain relief techniques for different types of pain in the ICU. Alternatively, you can explore the role of individualized care plans in addressing the unique pain needs of each patient.

Here are some other fresh topics for your project on pain control strategies in ICU nursing care:

1. Non-Opioid Analgesics and Their Efficiency in ICU Settings.
2. Implementing a Pain Management Nursing Protocol for Orthopedic Surgical Patients.
3. The Use of Multimodal Analgesia in ICU Patients.
4. Assessment of Cultural Competence in Pain Control.
5. How Does Improving Sleep Quality Affect Pain Levels in ICU Patients?

⭐ Simple & Easy Intensive Care Essay Titles

1. Risk Factors for Intensive Care Unit Admission in Patients with Autoimmune Encephalitis
2. Chronic Pain and Chronic Opioid Use After Intensive Care
3. Premature Infants’ Physiologic Outcomes in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
4. The Relationship Between Safety Climate and Performance in Intensive Care Units
5. Intensive Care Unit Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
6. Treatment of Severe Infections in the Intensive Care
7. The Needs of Bereaved Parents in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit
8. Intensive Care Unit-Acquired Weakness
9. Nosocomial Infections and the Infant Intensive Care Unit
10. Complications and In-Hospital Mortality in Trauma Patients Treated in Intensive Care Units
11. The Uniform Need for Critical and Intensive Care Skills in All Branches of Nursing
12. Moral Distress Among European Intensive Care Nurses
13. Capacity Planning for Intensive Care Units
14. Real-Time Predictive Analytics for Therapeutic Plans in Intensive Care
15. Nursing and the Importance of Intensive Care
16. Abuse of Drugs and Alcohol in the Intensive Care Unit
17. Physician Scheduling for Continuity: An Application in Pediatric Intensive Care
18. Monitoring Oxygenation and Gas Exchange in Neonatal Intensive Care Units
19. Mortality in Intensive Care Unit Patients
20. The Requirement for Supplementary Nurses in an Intensive Care Unit

⚖️ Ethical Issues in Critical Care Nursing: Research Topics

You can investigate moral issues that arise when caring for critically ill patients. Some problems include life and death decision-making, informed consent, and allocation of limited resources. Besides, consider examining how these ethical dilemmas affect patients and healthcare providers.

Look at some topics on ethical issues in critical care nursing that are worth investigating:

1. Ethical Aspects of Caring for Patients in a Persistent Vegetative State.
2. How Do Consent Guidelines Vary Across ICU Settings?
3. Ethical Concerns in the Use of Experimental Therapies.
4. Cultural and Religious Considerations in Critical Care Ethics.
5. What Ethical Principles Guide ICU Resource Allocation During Shortages?