Becoming a critical care physician is challenging. Also known as a critical care specialist or an intensivist, these medical professionals possess great skills and qualities to fetch clinical expertise. The requirement of working in a high-pressure environment such as ICUs, looking after critical and deteriorating patients, assessing symptoms, and keeping a note of their progress is a part of their job. It is indeed challenging but a rewarding career option.
What are the Roles and Responsibilities of a Critical Care Physician?
There isn’t any one responsibility. It is multifaceted! From suggesting lab tests to diagnosing, assessing symptoms, and curing patients, it’s all in the bucket of a critical care physician.
Here are the details:
- Maintaining medical records, aligning with other medical professionals, having a multidisciplinary team leadership, and mentoring junior staff in the above-mentioned practices are their duties.
- They could be the point of contact for patients’ families. Hence, they play a major role in being a mediator and handling situations wisely from a psychological perspective.
What are the Challenges Faced by Critical Care Specialists?
They excel in clinical expertise! But to make patients calm, they need to keep themselves stress-free. They work in a stressful and demanding environment and face many challenges. Let’s understand those:
What do they all face?
Working ethically in critical situations is daring! Critical care physicians work for long hours, not in a fixed shift, and under highly stressful situations, still try to make a significant impact on the patients.
These medical professionals must work in rotational shifts and align with other teammates. Moreover, catering to different types of patients is also a challenge. Other than that, there could be medical sessions by hospitals or medicine video lectures or discussions on general medicine and a medicine MD course, or specifically- discussions on critical care courses. Sometimes, a critical care specialist must align themselves with such activities too!
Apart from this, standing for long hours, extending and pushing limits, and demanding employment at nursing homes, polyclinics, rehabilitation centres, hospitals, etc. are also part of the challenges they face.
What is the Qualification Required to Become a Critical Care Physician?
To begin with, a medical student needs to wrap up a medical school or Medicine MD, followed by the residency. The Latter stage involves fellowship in critical care medicine. Read below for clarity over the same.
- Residency: Residency in a chosen field can be completed, including emergency medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, anesthesiology, or orthopedic surgery.
- Fellowship in Critical Care: A one to three years of critical care medicine fellowship must be completed. The period depends upon residency or additional sub-specialty training. For instance, if a medical student is taking up a speciality, the training can extend up to three years, making a student eligible for certification in both fields. This is important to prepare a critical care physician skilled enough to handle the complexities of critical care.
What’s the study route to becoming a Critical Care Specialist?
- MBBS/Bachelor’s degree
- Including Internship
- MD in Medicine
- Including Residency Training
- Fellowship
Today, study is also possible with the help of digital mediums. Medicine video lectures, medicine MD online course, and other digital options make it easy to carry on study with practical/on-field work. To seek guidance and clinical expertise, an MD in medicine can become easy and productive with the Medicine MD course online by Dr. Jyotirmoy Pal and Dr. Shashank R Joshi. This meticulously designed course is indeed very helpful!
What are the Qualities Required in a Critical Care Physician?
If you are dedicated enough to pursue Critical Care, the following qualities are the most important:
- Communication Skills: Impactful communication is highly important in critical care. Conversation with patients is a tedious task. Excelling the art of communication makes a student a pro critical care physician.
- Medicine Expertise: Critical care specialists must have an in-depth understanding of general medicine and the capability of diagnosing the medical ailments of patients. That’s where MBBS or MD in medicine would come into play! The students must be particular about their training sessions and must know about severe diseases, ailments, and their treatment.
- Attention to Detail: In the field of critical care, giving attention to minute details is the most important. Monitoring vitals, diagnostic tests, treatment plans, etc. include details and data that cannot be messed up. Therefore, it’s important to develop skills of being attentive, data-oriented, and alert.
- Problem Solving Skills: With patients of critical care, as a critical care physician, you must juggle! Making sane decisions under pressure is required most of the time. Stabilising patients with impactful solutions under critical situations is a skill in itself, and that’s required!
- Teamwork: A single hand cannot handle critical emergencies. Multidisciplinary team leadership, delegation and taking responsibility are necessary. Therefore, keeping high-quality care in mind, it’s important to develop the skill of teamwork.
Conclusion
This is a dynamic field. It requires a combination of medical knowledge, excellent communication, attention to detail, leadership skills, teamwork, problem-solving attitude, and great patience to be able to become a successful critical care physician. The journey is long and challenging, but the opportunity to make a profound difference in critical moments makes it a noble profession.