The world's top critical care doctors are in Durban to discuss the challenges in intensive care units and in patients suffering life threatening conditions.

Close to 2000 medical practitioners are meeting at the 11th Congress of the World Federation of Intensive and Critical Care
Medicine in KwaZulu-Natal.

Head of Anaesthesiology & Critical Care at Nelson Mandela School of Medicine, Dr Dean Gopalan, says critical care is a mind set that extends beyond the mere Intensive Care Unit (ICU) walls.

Gopalan says developing countries generally face more challenges in better equipping themselves to deal with this kind of high level care.

"Limitation of resources in the form of human personnel infrastructure and equipment - these present a problem no matter where you are in the world and it’s about trying to balance that against the service and the need of the patients that we deal with. So that presents the biggest challenge."

Conference co-chair and Professor of Anaesthesiology at the University of Washington in the US, Dr Satish Bhagwanjee says a strong focus at the conference will be the treatment of sepsis. Bhagwanjee says one of the aims of the congress is to see the creation of a programme and guidelines to manage sepsis in low income countries.

“Identify mechanisms to create training and research capacity for South Africa and the African continent, the second relates to us being able to reach out to communities. The intention is to use the youth to be our messengers in terms of informing people about the key problems that we face.

"To me, they are the leaders of tomorrow, they have very unique ways of thinking of problems and therefore have unique ways of thinking of solutions,” explains Bhagwanjee.

http://www.criticalcare2013.com/

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The world's top critical care doctors are in Durban to discuss the challenges in intensive care units and in patients suffering life threatening conditio...