Critical care for the surgical patient.

Dr Chris Aps has been involved, since the early 1980s, with the impact of the surgical patient on critical care provision. At that time, he established clinical techniques to lower patient dependency after cardiac surgery. This allowed for the postoperative management of such patients in a general recovery facility rather than in the formal Intensive Care Unit (ICU). This became known as cardiac fast-tracking and led to the development of the Overnight Intensive Recovery (OIR) concept.