Critical Care & Respiratory Care

The Critical Care and Respiratory 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 housestaff, 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.

Respiratory Care

The department's Respiratory Care team provides a full spectrum of inpatient and outpatient health care services 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Respiratory Care is committed to focus on improve patient care process. With the help of highly trained equipment techs and internal information system support, our therapists can focus on the essentials of quality patient care. To do so, respiratory therapists are systematically assigned specific areas to promote respiratory excellence.

Respiratory Care provides services to a full range of patients from toddler to the elderly with emphasis in acute and critical care. Therapists typically use both conventional and nonconventional ventilators within the intensive care areas. The department supports and delivers Heliox therapy for various types of airway obstructions.

The Respiratory Care team maintains a commitment to providing continuity of care by a variety of multidisciplinary activities. Respiratory therapists are actively involved with other members of the health care team and participate in the development of procedural protocols, research projects and staff education.

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 then testing potential solutions in both animal models and clinical trials. These efforts include

• Describing patterns of medical and surgical critical illness specific to the cancer population and predicting outcome in the ICU.
• Finding new ways to predict those 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.