In 2010, the Society of Critical Care Medicine organized a task force to raise awareness of the long-term cognitive, psychological, and physical impairments in survivors of critical illness. Impairments in these three domains are collectively known as post-intensive care syndrome (PICS). PICS affects 50–70% of intensive care unit (ICU) survivors, and its effects can persist for 5–15 years after ICU hospitalization. One major barrier in the assessment of PICS is the lack of a single, validated clinical tool to rapidly assess impairments in all three domains of PICS.

Medical advances over the past few decades have led to an overall decrease in patient mortality for those experiencing a traumatic health challenge. Research on long-term health out comes post-traumatic illness has shown there is an increase and worsening of functional morbidity resulting from the critical illnesses and associated therapies and treatments experienced by patients.Pollack et al.(2014) estimates morbidity (the rate of ongoing clinical health challenges) to be as high as4.8%, twice the rate of mortality. Preventing or reducing mortality is no longer the sole outcome measure for effectiveness of critical care interventions(Herrup et al.,2017). Rather, ensuring optimal long-term health outcomes post-trauma are a major focus of current healthcare interventions in the intensive care unit (ICU).

A steadily increasing number of patients survive their stay in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), and a significant percentage become chronic cases. Patient post-intensive care syndrome (PICS-P) is a recently described condition that affects an important number of patients (30---50%). It encompasses the physical (mainly respiratory and neuromuscular), cognitive (memory and attention) and psychological sequelae (depression, anxiety, stress and/or post traumatic stress syndrome)
at discharge from the ICU, and which have a negative impact
upon patient quality of life.