The goal of the Critical Care Medicine Fellowship is to train board-eligible or board-certified internists in the subspecialty of critical care medicine. Fellows will be exposed to the clinical aspects of critical care medicine as well as teaching, administration, and research in order to prepare them to function in either an academic center or a community hospital environment.
The duration of the fellowship is one or two years, depending on board-eligibility requirements. A fellow may be offered an additional year to pursue research interests by special arrangement.
The medical/surgical intensive care unit is staffed by a multispecialty group of full-time faculty members from the departments of medicine, surgery and anesthesia. The ratio of faculty to trainees exceeds 1:1.
The first year is predominantly clinical, with the majority of time spent in the medical/surgical ICU and additional time in related clinical areas, such as intubation training, the cardiovascular surgery service and the coronary care unit. The second year provides time in the following areas: additional clinical experience in the critical care units, elective and research. Fellows who intend to pursue academic careers are encouraged to spend at least six months on a research rotation.
Rotations are available in the pediatric ICU (under the direction of the pediatric intensivists) and shock-trauma unit (under the direction of the trauma surgeons). Electives available include pulmonary medicine, nephrology, clinical anesthesia, infectious diseases, neurocritical care, and echocardiology. The program for each fellow is tailored to that fellow’s background and goals.
Procedures
The attending physician has ultimate responsibility for care rendered by the critical care fellow. Therefore, depending on the procedure and the degree of experience of the trainee, supervision of procedures may or may not be required. Supervision, when required, will be direct observation of the fellow performing the procedure by the attending physician or other qualified supervisor.
Research
All fellows will be expected to complete a research project, quality improvement project, and patient safety project during their fellowship, and protected time is provided for this purpose. The time commitment and extent of research involvement depends upon the fellow’s interest in pursuing an academic career. Each fellow’s research interest will be matched with appropriate investigative projects in clinical or basic science research, and will be guided and monitored by an academic critical care physician whose expertise coincides with the area under study. While participation in ongoing projects is invited, two-year trainees are required to implement at least one laboratory or clinical research project of their own design and present their data in an open scientific forum.