Specialized Care
Iowa State University’s Equine Hospital, has a specialized intensive care unit (ICU) to help provide the highest level of care for the most critically ill adult, neonatal and pediatric horses. To help meet the growing need for intensive specialized care, we our equine ICU is expanding (link).
Horses in our ICU are housed in climate-controlled stalls with a centralized nursing station, similar to many human hospitals. For critically ill mares and foals, special stall dividers allow for individualized intensive care of both the mare and foals while still supporting the mare-foal bond. Horses are continuously monitored 24-7 by the ICU team consisting of doctors and nurses, assisted by 4th year veterinary students. Additionally, each stall is equipped with video surveillance to allow the care team to continuously monitor multiple patients at one time.
For horse’s with neurological disease, our ICU has a specialized padded stall with a hoist and several specialized slings to support horses that are weak and unable to stand on their own.
Additionally, we have the state’s only equine isolation unit which allows us to provide ICU level care to horses with potentially infectious diseases or compromised immune systems, while preventing the spread of disease to other horses in the hospital as well as limiting the risk of disease to that individual horse. Similarly, horses in our isolation unit have individually climate-controlled stalls and are continuously monitored with video surveillance by our care team. As with our ICU, the Isolation Unit has several stalls designed for critically ill mares and foals which allow for intensive individualized treatment of the mare and/or foal while still supporting the mare-foal bond.