You will develop your competency level in critical care as you manage patients and learn a variety of intensive care procedures.
During our ICU/critical care rotations, you will care for patients admitted or transferred to the ICU services. On a daily basis, your duties will include interviewing patients, performing physical examinations, formulating a care plan and reviewing laboratory and diagnostic studies. During the staffing round, the staff physician will rely on you to provide all patient information and lay out patients’ management plans.
We require you to take at-home call for the service on weekends and nights. You will share weekend call with other fellows.
Our critical care rotations let you experience multidisciplinary cooperation among different health professionals including nurses, dietitians, respiratory therapists and pharmacists.
You will be responsible for rounding daily with the residents assigned to the service. Directing the residents in patients’ daily care, you will have significant input in patient management. While overseeing these residents and interns, the attending physicians will supervise you. Later in your training, you will act as a team leader in the ICU; this hierarchical structure enables you to learn from our experienced physicians while assuming supervisory roles.
We provide you with a variety of learning methods in these rotations. You will hone your skills via daily bedside rounds, which give you opportunities to discuss pertinent findings. You will also acquire knowledge through our daily teaching rounds that focus on current or past patients and review similar cases and findings.
We'll further augment your learning experience when you participate in our didactic conferences and attend semiweekly didactic lectures. Moreover, you can depend on the attending physicians to provide outside sources of information that will help steadily expand your knowledge base.
Invasive procedures are an important component of critical care. As part of your training, you will learn the indications, contraindications and relative risks for procedures including:
You will become familiar with indications for procedures including:
In addition, the attending physicians will work closely with you while you:
You will rotate at the ICUs of two of our clinical training sites:
You can expect to see more than 100 patients per rotation at the Buffalo General Medical Center ICU. At the Buffalo VA Medical Center, you will see at least 50 patients per rotation.