Welcome, and thank you for using this site as part of your ICU rotation. Caring for critically ill patients is a core competency expected of you regardless of your specialty, but the ICU has always been a tough place to learn it. The pace is fast, patient acuity is high, and the workflow is unpredictable, factors that routinely cut into scheduled didactics and bedside teaching. Add to that short rotations, day/night/swing shift schedules, and the growing clinical demands placed on both you and the faculty teaching you, and it becomes easy to leave a rotation having missed key sessions or never having had certain core topics covered at all. The asynchronous modules hosted here are designed to fix that. They give you structured, on-demand coverage of foundational critical care topics that you can work through on your own schedule, so that every trainee, no matter your background, prior ICU experience, or shift assignment, starts from the same baseline. These modules are intended to be completed before the in-person, case-based learning (CBL) sessions that make up the other half of this blended curriculum, so that your time with faculty can be spent on the application, clinical reasoning, and hands-on competency development that are best learned through real time discussions. The goal isn't to replace teaching at the bedside, but to supplement it so that when you're learning together, you can build on a shared foundation rather than spend that time just trying to get caught up.

Curriculum Goals

We recognize that many (most) of you will not go on to become ICU physicians. An overarching goal of this curriculum is not to change that or turn you into an intensivist over the course of two to four weeks. Rather, learning how to acquire knowledge and apply it to clinical scenarios is a skill that will benefit you regardless of your career path. We hope the design of this curriculum gives you that opportunity while learning a few things about critical care along the way. Similarly, this is not an all-encompassing curriculum. Ideally, it will give you an opportunity to demonstrate self-directed learning and clinical inquiry skills within the ICU environment by generating meaningful clinical questions arising from the asynchronous modules, engaging in bedside teaching, and identifying gaps in your own knowledge. Lastly, the purposeful combination of asynchronous modules, case-based learning, and clinical care should allow for a gradual progression of clinical competence from acquiring knowledge to the interpretation and application of information in a controlled setting (CBL) to supervised demonstration of that knowledge at the bedside. The overarching goal is to utilize these materials and CBL sessions to improve your core critical care knowledge and enhance the educational value of your ICU rotation. 

How To Use This Site

Core critical care content is covered in the "Lecture Modules" sections, with each module broken down into 10-20 minute segments. Use these modules early during the course of your ICU rotations to help lay a foundation upon which to build. There are optional pre- and post-assessments, which are anonymous and primarily meant to help you identify your own knowledge gaps and secondarily help us guage the effectiveness of the material. Detailed explainations are provided along with teaching points in the post-assessment only. 

Case-Based Learning (CBL) cases are paired with each of the lecture modules. These are to be completed in-person with ICU faculty and to provide an opportunity for you to think critically and apply the principles taught in the lecture modules in a safe learning environment. This is also a good time to bring forward questions that came up during the modules and/or to ask how the critical care faculty approach similar cases. 

The "Chalk Talks" are meant to provide exposure to a larger range of topics not covered in the lecture modules. Each is about 15 minutes covering a specific topic related to critical care. A small selection of relevant articles are provided, along with external resources related to critical care. These should be thought of as bonus material, while the modules and CBL sessions should be prioritized.