[Care grading in Intensive Medicine: Intermediate Care Units]. / Gradación asistencial en Medicina Intensiva: Unidades de Cuidados Intermedios.

Intermediate Care Units are created for patients who predictably have low risk of requiring therapeutic life support measures but who require more monitoring and nursing cares than those received in the conventional hospitalization wards. Previous studies have demonstrated that Intermediate Care Units may promote hospital care grading, allowing for better classification in critical patients, improving efficacy and efficiency of the ICUs and thus decreasing costs and above all mortality in the conventional hospitalization wards. This document attempts to group the currently existing knowledge that served as a base for the consensus meeting on the application of them in the establishment of future ICUs in our hospital setting.