HDU full form in medical term is High Dependency Unit. There are usually three wards in a hospital. The first one is a general ward, where doctors keep patients for general observation and treatment. The second one is HDU, where doctors only keep patients with high dependency and those who need intensive observation during their treatment. The ICU (intensive care unit) is another ward that doctors use when the patient’s condition is critical. Usually, people confuse HDU with ICU, but in reality, these two ward types are quite different.
In some hospitals, HDUs and ICUs are combined and can be used for both intensive observation and care. However, mostly, you’ll find HDU and ICU are made quite close, so that if a patient’s condition becomes critical, then doctors and hospital staff can move the patient to ICU quickly. In critical cases, time is the most important thing. It’s therefore a good thing to keep the HDU ward and ICU ward very close. Talking about the technical differences, in HDU, there will be general equipment to monitor the condition of a patient. On the other hand, in the ICU ward, there are all sorts of life-saving equipment present.