Special Employees and Conditions in the ICU: Introduction

00:06 Hello ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to our Series of Lectures on Anesthesiology. Today we're going to make a change in direction and talk about Intensive Care Medicine. What Intensive Care is? The different types of Intensive Care.

00:24 The qualifications of intensivists, whether they be nurses or doctors. And many of the conditions that are treated in the Intensive Care Unit. We'll also talk about special drugs in the ICU and some special devices that are used in the ICU. So, what is an intensive care unit? Well, it's an specialized unit in the hospital where the sickest patients are cared for.

00:48 The physicians and staff in the ICU have special training to allow them to care for these very sick patients.

00:54 There are drugs that are only used in the ICU and highly sophisticated pieces of equipment which assist in providing care. The majority of patients in the ICU will have more than one critical illnesses and more than one organ system, so it is extremely common in the ICU for patients to have multisystem organ disease. So, how does anesthesia fit into all of this? Well, the Operating Room is often seen as an ICU.

01:24 And anesthesiologists are often the primary physician in the ICU. Particularly in rural hospitals where there aren't a lot of subspecialty physicians, it's often the anesthesiologists who take on the care of the most critically ill patients in the ICU.