Mastering Intensive Care

The physical, mental and emotional burden of the COVID-19 pandemic on Intensive Care clinicians has been colossal. Many ICU staff, of all types and at all levels, have suffered significant psychological effects. After hearing the pandemic experiences and perspectives of bedside clinicians in recent episodes, the focus of today's episode is a clinical psychologist who's been working inside several...

Whilst some people choose to run long distances, caring for patients in the ICU is not supposed to feel like an ultramarathon. If you work in the complex, high stress, emotion-generating environment of an ICU, it might sometimes feel like you are the logistics organiser of an ultimate endurance event, but you should hardly feel like you are a competitor. Yet when COVID-19 arrived, the initial spri...

Just like a surf beach shore, waves of COVID-19 keep crashing over the world's Intensive Care Units. The waves have been unpredictable and pattern less, ravaging the ICUs and the people that work in them, often inconceivably. In this second episode of the "Persevering Through A Pandemic" series, you'll hear from Intensive Care professionals about the COVID-19 pandemic which continues to affect ICU...

Are you sick of COVID? How have you coped in this pandemic? And what's it actually felt like to live and work throughout this last two years?   Concerned for the wellbeing of healthcare professionals in the hardest hit ICUs during the COVID-19 pandemic, I interviewed a group of clinicians previously featured on the podcast. With an emphasis on personal wellbeing, I aimed to uncover their feelings,...

I'm trying something different on Mastering Intensive Care. Welcome to a special series named "Persevering Through A Pandemic" . Aghast at the stories I'd heard from Intensive Care colleagues amid large COVID-19 surges I approached several previous podcast guests in countries that had been harder hit than Australia. Concerned for their wellbeing I asked if they'd talk to me about what they'd been...

Mastering Intensive Care is back after a lengthy break with an episode featuring senior ICU dietitian Dr Emma Ridley. Emma is a Senior Research Fellow and a NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre (ANZIC-RC) at Monash University in Melbourne, where she leads the Nutrition Program. Emma has 16 years of clinical dietetic experience, including...

This episode features Professor David Tuxen, a pioneer of Intensive Care in Australia, who recently retired after 38 years at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne. David trained in both respiratory and intensive care medicine, and became the Alfred's ICU Director at a young age. He led the development of one of Australia's first mega-ICUs before standing down after over 20 years as Director to re-ener...

In this episode the focus is on our Intensive Care friends in the UK and what they are going through right now with COVID-19. My guest is Rupert Pearse, a Professor and Consultant in Intensive Care Medicine at Barts Health NHS Trust and Queen Mary University of London. He works at the Royal London Hospital, which was at the epicentre of the first wave and now the second COVID wave in East London....

This wide-ranging episode, covering many angles of how we should consider doing less interventions to our patients and more transparent communication to their families, features US intensivist Todd Rice. Dr Todd Rice, is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary, and Critical Care Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) in Nashville, Tennessee. Todd i...

This first podcast episode of 2021 is my attempt to put into perspective at least some of what has happened over the whirlwind of the last 12 months. We can't control what happens to us, yet we can control our actions in response to our circumstances and we can learn from our experience. I feel like the whole experience of COVID has delivered a few important lessons for us as an Intensive Care com...

Two inspiring and innovative educationalists, Dr Roger Harris and Dr Oliver Flower, are featured in this episode. Both of these Sydney intensivists are the force behind the recently created educational initiative named Coda, having previously been two members of the successful triumvirate who set up SMACC (Social Media and Critical Care). To my mind Oliver (or Oli) and Roger have led an educationa...

The guest on this episode is Nurse Practitioner Naomi Pratt who describes the lingering and harrowing effects of long COVID. Naomi is a Nurse Practitioner who jointly manages and leads the Critical Care Liaison Nurse service at Peninsula Health. In this role she provides clinical leadership and the Intensive Care response to Medical Emergency Team calls. She has completed post graduate qualificati...

This episode is a departure from recent conversations about COVID-19 material to cover some very important topics on the human side of what we do in the ICU. My hope is you will glean valuable insights from an intensivist I admire greatly as both an expert practitioner and an esteemed educator of high-level intensive care communication - amongst other things, of course. Dr Steve Philpot is an Inte...

2020 has been a roller coaster year and I wish to acknowledge my friends of the Intensive Care world for your outstanding and awe-inspiring efforts as clinicians, researchers, educators, digital content creators, and mostly as human beings, compassionately caring for others in a truly unprecedented global crisis. COVID-19 is far from over yet. Massive numbers of cases are still being reported each...

In many parts of the world the COVID-19 pandemic is overburdening Intensive Care Units with huge numbers of critically unwell patients, many of whom are dying. Whilst China, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and the UK have been crisis-ridden over the last few months, one of the most inundated parts of the world right now is the USA and especially the state of New York. In this episode you will hear t...

In the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, this episode focuses on the pandemic planning all ICUs should be doing - if they haven't already been overwhelmed. This week a Working Group of 30 colleagues released the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society (ANZICS) COVID-19 Guidelines. This episode features the Chair of that Working Group, A/Prof Steve McGloughlin. Steve is an intensivis...

Our need to bring our best selves to work has become more important in the face of this COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe. Many intensive care clinicians are presently overwhelmed by escalating numbers of critically ill COVID-19 patients whilst many others are carefully preparing for seemingly inevitable local outbreaks. There is an eerie feeling where I live and work in Melbourne especially wi...

Those of you who are consultant intensivists or attendings hopefully remember most of your trainees - especially the ones you met when you were a brand new intensivist. In this episode I speak with Dr Georg Auzinger who in 1997 moved from Austria to Australia to train in intensive care at the same ICU I was beginning my first job as a specialist intensivist. I have fond memories of working with Ge...

In this episode I talk about what's been recently published in the medical literature to help you master intensive care from a humanity point of view. In a departure from the usual interview episode, and as a trial, I searched the December 2019 issues of 8 well-respected journals and found a large number of articles focused on non-technical aspects of intensive care. Not the drugs, devices, proced...

Anyone who has heard UK intensivist Prof Mervyn Singer speak at an Intensive Care conference will no doubt enjoy listening to him speak on this episode of Mastering Intensive Care. Mervyn Singer is Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at University College London in the UK. He was born, bred, trained, and now works in London as an intensivist and a researcher whose career spans from basic mechanis...

In this episode of the Mastering Intensive Care podcast we replay a previous episode which featured Deborah Cook (broadcast originally as episode 46). Deborah is an intensivist at St. Joseph's Healthcare in Hamilton and Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics, and Academic Chair of Critical Care at McMaster University. Deborah has received numerous awards for her...

In this episode of the Mastering Intensive Care podcast we replay a previous episode which featured Paul Wischmeyer (broadcast originally as episode 35). Paul is a Professor of Anesthesiology and Surgery, the Director of Perioperative Research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute and the Co-Director of the Nutrition Support Service at Duke University Hospital in the United States. Paul works ma...

In this episode of the Mastering Intensive Care podcast we replay a previous episode which featured Martin Bromiley (broadcast originally as episode 21 ). Martin is an airline captain, whose wife Elaine Bromiley sadly died in tragic circumstances, the story of which he describes here and is also documented in the video "Just a routine operation". Martin used his experience in human factors to foun...

Happy New Year. Thanks for listening to Mastering Intensive Care in 2019. If you reflect on and put into action many of the perspectives shared on this podcast, and if your colleagues do too, I truly believe your ICUs should improve in the care you deliver. That's not to say you don't do well already. It's rather to suggest that the topics we cover on this podcast are not covered well in textbooks...

To celebrate the 50 episode milestone, podcast host and intensivist Andrew Davies (yes that's me) is in the spotlight. Having started the show to learn perspectives that could help me, as well as you, to be better and more human healthcare professionals, I've published 49 episodes with some amazing guests. Based on many of you asking for this, I finally plucked up the courage and switched the micr...