Critical Care

The Critical Care department was organized in 1997 to develop a unified, multidisciplinary approach to critical care in our 52-bed, state-of-the-art, Intensive Care Unit. 

Critically ill medical and surgical patients are managed by a multidisciplinary team of board-certified intensivists trained in the fields of anesthesiology, pulmonary medicine and surgery, critical care fellows, anesthesiology house staff, mid-level providers, critical care nurses, respiratory care practitioners, pharmacists, nutritionists, physical therapists, ethicists, social workers and members of the clergy. Our team works side by side with the primary oncology teams to treat the life-threatening complications that sometimes arise during a cancer patient’s treatment.

Research

The department's research mission is to facilitate oncology studies at MD Anderson. Research in the department typically involves identifying problems from clinical observational studies and quality improvement initiatives and testing potential solutions in the lab and through clinical trials. These efforts include:

• Describing patterns of medical and surgical critical illness specific to the cancer population and predicting outcomes in the ICU
• Finding new ways to predict patients at greatest risk of treatment toxicity
• Developing techniques for organ function preservation to allow patients to tolerate increasingly toxic cancer treatments
• Providing expert physiological measurements to collaborators as they measure the efficacy of their own novel treatments

Please see the Critical Care and Respiratory Care research page for more information.