Anesthesia Critical Care Fellowship
The Future of Critical Care Education is Multidisciplinary
The intensivist of the future will need an appreciation of all the traditional domains of critical care education: pulmonology, anesthesiology, surgery, and neurology; as well as the resuscitation skill set of emergency medicine. With this broad exposure, our fellows will develop domain-independent ability in managing the critically ill patient. We welcome Anesthesia trained applicants for a 1-year fellowship and our Emergency Medicine applicants for 2 years of training.
Our training program is focused on providing the trajectory toward mastery in critical care medicine. This is delivered with a rich clinical environment, a tripartite educational curriculum and a philosophy of fellow autonomy in leading multidisciplinary teams
The clinical environment at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center has great variety and acuity of critical care pathology. We are a Level 1 trauma center, with a large penetrating trauma cohort. We are an active transplant center, with programs focusing on heart, lung, liver, and kidney transplant. Further, we have a very active advanced heart failure and cardiothoracic surgery program, which features a large cohort of Left Ventricular Assist Device Implantations as well as a high volume ECMO service (over 100 patient runs in 2021, including ECPR). Fellows participate in ECMO cannulations and are responsible for daily ECMO management. Our “home” units are the cardiothoracic intensive care unit (CTICU) and the surgical intensive care unit (SICU). Our fellows also serve as primary fellows in the trauma intensive care unit (TICU) and neurosciences ICU (NSICU).
Our curriculum interweaves three curricular features: didactics on core intensive care topics, a journal club that teaches tenets of evidence-based medicine, and a point of care critical care ultrasound experience. Didactics are taught by institutional leaders across all domains of critical care. These occur once or twice weekly. Journal club is led by attendings, initially, and transforms to a fellow run curriculum critically appraising the canon of critical care medicine. Our POCUS curriculum features monthly didactics with institutional and national ultrasound leaders, quality assurance/image review, with the aim of having fellows able to sit for the Critical Care Echo Boards at the conclusion of the fellowship. There are other opportunities for further transesophageal echocardiography instruction with our partners in the cardiothoracic anesthesiology fellowship. A snapshot of the curriculum is below:
We expect our fellows to run our critical care rounds, with appropriate attending supervision. Our fellows function as a “junior attending” and not a “super resident”. This is intentional. The ability to lead multidisciplinary teams is a skill that needs to be developed, and requires autonomy for the fellow to lead teams of residents, advanced practice clinicians, pharmacists, respiratory therapists and our excellent nursing colleagues. This mirrors the future practice of the intensivist.
We welcome all trainee pathways to our program. We practice as well as preach multidisciplinary care. Our program director is Anesthesia Trained, Curriculum Director is Emergency medicine trained, and we share our curriculum with our Surgical Critical Care colleagues. The future of critical care is multidisciplinary.
Please visit our official Fellowship page for more information!