In this article, we describe the response from our intensive care unit (ICU) within a large tertiary private metropolitan Australian hospital. We hope this information may be useful to other ICUs in Australia, for any second wave of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and for any future pandemics.

In early March 2020, the ICU medical staff leadership group began to simultaneously develop and implement training, strategies and processes within the ICU in an attempt to best prepare for the pandemic.

At that point, we expected a significant increase in COVID-19 ICU admissions to occur in early April and did not receive our first confirmed COVID-19 patient with respiratory failure to the ICU until 28 March 2020. Table 1 describes our broad principles of unit preparation.

We set about a tiered response with an early focus on infrastructure, staff education, new equipment and establishing personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies.

It was planned to use multiple communication channels (eg, WhatsApp, email, Zoom for video-conferencing, and Slack for file sharing) to aid in rapid communication to staff and file sharing, and to seek out early collaboration with our emergency and anaesthetic departments to develop policies and implement education together to ensure a consistent message to staff.

The positive impact that a number of practitioners on both our emergency and anaesthetic departments have had on our ICU and the wider hospital has been immeasurable.

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