Supporting Each Other in Critical Care Careers

The Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) was formally established in 1971 by visionary leaders Max Harry Weil, Peter Safar, and William Shoemaker, who sought to create a new way of providing care to critically ill and injured patients. From the very beginning, SCCM’s founders understood intimately the need for multidisciplinary and multiprofessional care to ensure the best possible outcomes for our patients and their families. While it is difficult to imagine a world in which critical care differed from what it is today, the feat of transitioning this revolutionary idea into an organization was a herculean effort. Once SCCM was organized, implementing this care model within critical care was not initially viewed positively. Frankly, change is hard! Yet this idea of implementing multiprofessional critical care teams persisted, and today critical care is different from what it was then.
 
Some critical care teams comprise physicians, advanced practice providers (APPs), nurses, pharmacists, respiratory care practitioners, nutritionists, and additional allied health professionals, while others continue to work toward this goal or do not have the resources to achieve it. Across the world, the model for the provision of critical care services varies. While an intensivist-led team is the ultimate goal, availability of trained physicians, finances, infrastructure, and other variables impact the ability to implement this model. Furthermore, in some areas, there is a lack of specialty-trained professionals for a variety of reasons, including lack of available education programs, financial hardship to secure education, and clinicians leaving the field or the intensive care unit (ICU) as a result of the pandemic or burnout. Ensuring high-quality critical care services is paramount to the patients and families we serve.
 
How do we meet the needs of ICU patients and their families when critical care professionals are in short supply? Perhaps starting well before secondary education to spur interest and future involvement in healthcare is a strategy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers were revered and thanked daily in the United States. Since that time, that support has wavered. No longer seen as heroes, healthcare workers and careers have lost the shine that started to bring students to the classrooms in the initial peripandemic period to be replaced by conversations about burnout and violence in the workplace.^1-5
 
Creating opportunities to inform people about the prospect of a career in our field is important. With so many options, highlighting the variety of healthcare careers is worthwhile, especially within critical care. When was the last time you saw a commercial about being a critical care professional or any type of healthcare professional? A grassroots effort might be needed to showcase who we are and what we do in critical care to secure the highest-quality care for all critically ill and injured patients. But where to start?
 
A nurse practitioner friend recently told me that, when she asked her young daughter if she wanted to be a nurse, her daughter replied, “No way! Your job is way too stressful!” Well, she isn’t wrong about that. Critical care is hard and very stressful, and how that is reflected in our world is important. Like many things in life, it starts at home. Often, we don’t see that we are bringing our work stress home until it is reflected back to us; it can be our wake-up call. We all have, at one point or another, arrived home to our safe zone, stressed, worn out, and overworked. Multimodal strategies to manage our stress is needed now more than ever and those strategies may be different for each of us—precision burnout care, if you will. The key here is finding what works for you.
 
Promoting careers in critical care needs to start with us. Saying our work is important is a gross understatement. Imagine a world with no critical care teams—frightening! Once we start at home, how do we move forward? Each opportunity that arises to speak about our critical care professions is valuable, whether to high school students, secondary education students, or university students in their chosen schools of medicine, nursing, and other allied healthcare fields. Bringing the importance of what we do together as a team to secure high-quality care for the most critically ill and injured patients and their families is necessary. Providing opportunities for observations in the ICU for those unsure of their professional paths can showcase our roles.
 
Using healthy work environment strategies to improve the ICU milieu for all critical care professionals is important. Supporting policies and practices that lift up our professions to maximize the full scope of practice will enhance the care we provide as a team, minimize workload by eliminating nonvaluable tasks, and promote retention. Creating and participating in mentorship programs can make a difference.
 
Each of these opportunities may or may not present themselves to us. Yet we have a responsibility, not only to ourselves, our families, and our workplaces, but also to our professions. We each have worked hard to get to where we are in our chosen careers. Lifting and caring for others who are suffering is what we do for our patients and their families; extending that to our colleagues is definitely not a stretch. We can do this. We can do it when we choose growth.
 

 
References:

1. American Association of Colleges of Nursing. New data shows enrollment declines in schools of nursing, raising concerns about the nation’s nursing workforce. May 2, 2023. Accessed March 20, 2024. https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-data/all-news/new-data-show-enrollment-declines-in-schools-of-nursing-raising-concerns-about-the-nations-nursing-workforce
2. Collegiate Gateway. Trends in MD medical school admissions. March 27, 2023. Accessed March 20, 2024. https://collegiategateway.com/trends-in-md-medical-school-admissions/
3. Blake T. How the pandemic has affected students’ decisions to enroll in Florida medical schools. WUSF. NPR. October 17, 2021. Accessed March 20, 2024. https://www.wusf.org/education/2021-10-17/how-pandemic-affected-students-decisions-florida-medical-school-enrollment
4. Ngo C. Medical students haven’t been deterred by the stress of Covid on hospitals and staffthey are eager to help. CNBC. April 6, 2021. Accessed March 20, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/06/applications-to-medical-schools-surged-during-the-covid-pandemic.html
5. Antrim A. Despite rapid growth of institutions, pharmacy school applications decline. Pharm Times. 2023 Spring;17(1). Accessed March 20, 2024. https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/despite-rapid-growth-of-institutions-pharmacy-school-applications-decline