Wikipedia defines intensive care medicine as a branch of medicine concerned with the diagnosis and management of life-threatening conditions requiring sophisticated organ support and invasive monitoring . 1 To this, I would add the line ‘for the patient’s benefit’ since this alters the above definition fundamentally. ...
READ MOREWhat would you single out as a career highlight? Combining my loves of medicine and art to create a colouring book about the brain, entitled 'A Journey Through the Brain'. This was a collaboration with the very creative and intelligent Prof David Cotter and Prof Mary Cannon at the Department of Psychiatry in RCSI. If you had not chosen this career...
READ MOREZoom On Professor John B. West Professor John B. West is a renowned respiratory physiologist and researcher. He joined the faculty of the University of California San Diego in 1969, where he still teaches first-year medical students. He is author of Respiratory physiology - the essentials , which has been translated into many languages, and...
READ MORENutrition is a cornerstone of recovery and rehabilitation in ICU patients, and the appointment of qualified dietitians can help to attain best results in a number of ways. Here we provide some of the key reasons to include a dietitian within your ICU team. 1. Sensible guidelines: Having a dietitian on hand within the ICU is important towards forming...
READ MOREA clinical sign such as oliguria is a marker of a significant problem. "Busy slides" in a presentation are a similar warning in a presentation. Neither oliguria nor busy slides can be accepted as a minor issue and resolved with a simple prescription. One must address the whole patient, diagnose the underlying pathology and manage that. "Busy slides"...
READ MOREThe intensivist of the future will need three sets of principles that guide everything they do: an internal set, an interpersonal set and an organisational set. Those internal principles that we should be selecting for are people who are humble, curious and compassionate. You cannot embrace intensive care medicine if you are not humble enough, and...
READ MOREKey opinion leaders (KOL) in the ICU field are often coming up with fantastic tips for becoming a better leader or clinician. We decided to share our top three with you: 1. Find/Encourage a Balance Balance is recommended in a variety of areas in life, and so it is with clinical practice too. It’s critical for a clinician to assess the criteria of...
READ MOREIntensive care clinicians and researchers from around the world have published recommendations to improve the acknowledged gender inequity in the discipline, making a strong call to action “to better leverage our collective talent to the benefit of our profession and critically ill patients worldwide”. The article is available ahead of print in the...
READ MORE1. Practise Good Self-Care It’s vital for your personal wellbeing that you take adequate breaks from work, including time for relaxation and respite in the form of hobbies and outdoor activities. Yoga and meditation can be particularly helpful for maintaining a balanced and clear mind, which equips you for making good, logical decisions that are not...
READ MORENidhi Nikhani, MD, shares 6 steps to implement ultrasonography in critical care, based on implementing ultrasound-guided central venous catheterisation (CVC) at Banner Health. 1. Define clinical challenges to be solved by implementing bedside ultrasound Banner Health faced the challenge of placing peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC)...
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