Over the last decade, the role of the physician anesthesiologist continues to expand outside of the O.R. into environments involving chronic pain management, various points in the Perioperative Surgical Home and the ICU. Critical care is very much a natural extension of the skill set we acquire as physician anesthesiologists: cardiopulmonary resuscitation, ventilator management, ECMO, hemodynamic monitoring, massive transfusion, risk stratification, airway management, renal replacement, line placement and ultrasonography are just a few of the topics that overlap from perioperative care to the ICU.
Critical care anesthesiology (CCA) is a one-year fellowship path through the San Francisco Match service. The application opens in November (early in comparison to other fellowships) and has grown by approximately 25 percent since 2014 to include 202 positions across 53 participating programs in 2017.1 Per the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), at least nine months must be spent “in the care of...