Intensive Care Units (ICUs) across the nation are under unprecedented strain, making clinical leadership in critical care more important than ever. C-suite leaders face mounting challenges from complex reimbursement models, persistent staffing shortages, and chronic under-resourcing, while frontline care teams manage volatile patient volumes and the constant demand to deliver high-quality, high-acuity care around the clock.

While the ICU is a critical component of the hospital, providing care to the sickest patients, it is often viewed as an expensive cost center driven by the management of complex patients and expensive care delivery.

Disconnect between C-suite professionals and those at the bedside causes a profound impact on patients and clinicians. Both perspectives must be acknowledged and aligned for hospitals and clinicians to succeed in their core mission and for patient outcomes to improve.

The time has come for a new approach and mindset when it comes to the ICU, one that combines the strategic thinking of the C-suite and clinical leadership with the clinical and operational skills of a clinician and enables a new ICU framework that helps achieve the strategic needs of the hospital. The new paradigm for the ICU calls for an interconnected view aligning holistic cost with complex clinical management requirements and the well-being of patients who require ICU-level care.

Drawing on almost two decades of clinical and operational leadership, SCP Health Vice President of Critical Care Medicine Erika Gabbard, DNP, RN, CCNS, CCRN-K explores how to break through siloed thinking and create a new, comprehensive approach and mindset when it comes to critical care medicine programs in her new white paper. Read to learn more about this pivotal shift and to discover concrete strategies for transforming the ICU, including: 

• Expanded roles of physicians, virtual health, and teleintensivist
• Optimized advanced practice provider scope and responsibility
• Clinical staffing integration
• Modernized nurse training