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To critically review the literature in order to describe the themes associated with the experience of critical illness and consider how these inform the patients understanding.

Critical illness requires life-saving intervention and application of high technology medicine and intensive nursing within a specialist critical care unit. Whilst an extensive and rapidly advancing knowledge of the physiological basis for treating critical illness exists, understanding how critical illness is experienced by the patient is less well understood.

Literature was retrieved through systematic searching of electronic databases, hand searches of journals and incremental searching.

26 qualitative studies of firsthand experiences of adult patients who had been in a critical care unit were reviewed. Key, common, explicit themes between the studies were identified as well as implicit themes …