Critical Care Fellowship
Introduction
The Department of Anesthesiology’s ACGME accredited critical care fellowship offers a graded exposure to the entire variety of critical care experiences including six months of direct patient care in the 20 bed general surgical ICU and the 24 bed cardio-thoracic & vascular intensive care unit. The fellow is both directly responsible for patient care as well as increasingly responsible for supervising senior and junior residents from the Anesthesiology and Surgery departments. Rotations in the medical ICU and neurosurgical ICU are typically included, as well as elective rotations including transesophageal and transthoracic echocardiography, inpatient nephrology/hemodialysis services, infectious diseases. The fellow is also an integral member of the extra-corporeal life support team (ECMO). The University of Michigan has been the leader in the development of ECMO clinical protocols and research, and supports among the largest ECMO centers in the country.
Our goal is to provide the clinical, educational, and administrative experiences for fellows to develop a wide-ranging but also deep knowledge of the variety of ICU problems and approaches to managing critically ill patients. Fellows will have both in-patient call experiences (every fourth night call along with senior and junior residents) as well as ICU rotations where call is from home in order to develop the appropriate skills to manage patients in different models of critical care.
Supervision of Fellows
Critical Care Fellows will be under the direct supervision of the faculty Intensivist on 24/7 call for the ICU in which they are assigned. This faculty will directly supervise and be ultimately responsible for the evaluation, management and decision making of the critical care fellow. Similarly, when the ICU fellow is asked to evaluate patients outside of the ICU (PACU, floor, ED etc), they will continue to be under the direct supervision of the attending ICU faculty on call. These faculty are also responsible to be sure the ICU fellow is competent to perform standard ICU procedures such as intravascular access, intubations, bronchoscopy, etc. More complex ICU procedures such as tracheotomies, ECMO cannulation, and bedside operative procedures will be performed by an ICU fellow, only with direct supervision of an ICU faculty credentialed to do these.
