Rethinking the role of postoperative critical care in an inequitable world

Inpatient care is a concept that is likely to be as old as medicine itself. Infirmaries and hospitals were established as places for providing better care for the sick, and often to isolate and keep them away in order to protect the community. In such establishments, it would have been logical to arrange patients in a way that those who were sicker would be more at sight to receive better care from the staff.