Pediatric critical care

The Geisinger Janet Weis Children’s Hospital pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) provides a full range of critical care services to the region’s severely ill or injured children. Our 14-bed unit cares for a wide variety of pediatric critical illness, such as overwhelming infections, respiratory failure, shock, asthma, status epilepticus, renal failure and endocrinological emergencies. In addition to caring for medical patients, the PICU cares for pediatric trauma patients and children recovering from major surgery. It supports an active pediatric cardiovascular surgery program providing postoperative care for these complex patients.

You’ll have an extremely active role in the PICU and, as such, will be a welcome member of our team. You’ll become integrated into the daily care of the critically ill child. Owing to the complexity of most PICU patients, you’ll follow one to two patients with resident supervision. Duties will include:

• Pre-rounding and data gathering on primary patients
• Normal presentation of patients on attending rounds
• Assisting (under attending supervision) with invasive procedures
• Writing of daily notes with resident and attending attestations
• Following up on all ordered diagnostics (imaging, laboratory results)
• Reviewing the medical literature pertinent to patients
• Providing a short oral presentation (15 minutes) to the PICU team on a pediatric critical care topic of your choosing

Your formal teaching will include:

• Daily bedside teaching, including review of all imaging studies
• Weekly formal critical care lectures
• Daily noon pediatric lectures
• Teaching of procedural skills
• Opportunities to observe postoperative pediatric congenital heart surgery patients
• Access to a multitude of electronic and print pediatric critical care resources
• Opportunities for research in the form of case reports

Goals and objectives

Our fourth-year elective in pediatric critical illness will offer you the opportunity to bridge many aspects of the preclinical basic sciences with clinical pathophysiology:

• The critically ill infant
• Airway
• Respiration
• Cardiovascular
• Neurological
• Metabolic
• Trauma