Critical Care: Key Information for Providing High-Quality Perioperative Care

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that understanding critical care is essential for all providers of anesthesia. At the beginning of the pandemic, many anesthesiologists worldwide were pulled from empty operating rooms to help take care of critically ill patients on ventilators in both the intensive care unit (ICU) and sometimes the operating room itself. The last several years have also led to patients with increasing complexity and severity of disease presenting to the operating room. In this issue of Anesthesiology Clinics of North America, a group of outstanding contributors wrote a series of articles on both intraoperative and postoperative care of complex patients and problems. Importantly, the authors also discuss the health and well-being of ICU physicians, which is critical in light of the previous couple of years. These articles bring important issues of interest to all practicing anesthesiologists.

In order to commission an issue on critical care, I engaged three amazing critical care anesthesiologists from diverse institutions who together chair the Scientific Writing Subcommittee of the Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologists. Athanasios Chalkias, MD, MSc, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Thessaly, Greece. As Dr Chalkias is a physician-scientist, his clinical activity and research are dedicated to anesthesiology, intensive care medicine, cardiovascular dynamics, resuscitation, translational intensive care medicine and anesthesiology, and translational physiology. He is a member of the Guidelines Committee and the Trauma and Resuscitation Scientific Forum of the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care. Mary Jarzebowski, MD is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan and the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, where she practices critical care medicine and anesthesiology. She completed her anesthesiology residency at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and a fellowship in critical care medicine at Northwestern University. Her research interests involve emergency airway management as well as mechanisms and clinical outcomes associated with sedation and analgesia in critically ill patients. Kathryn Rosenblatt, MD, MHS is Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine and Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and serves as co-director of the neurosurgical anesthesia fellowship. She completed a residency in anesthesiology at SUNY Upstate Medical University and fellowships in both neuroanesthesia and neurocritical care at Johns Hopkins. She also completed a research fellowship, earning an MHS in Clinical Investigation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr Rosenblatt’s research interests include cerebral autoregulation monitoring to improve outcomes from sepsis and sepsis-associated encephalopathy.