As critical care workforce shortages continue, and as Medicare enrollment swells—a number slated to increase an estimated 50% by 2030—hospitalists are increasingly filling in the gaps in their institutions’ intensive care units.1-2 In SHM’s 2005-06 survey, “The Authoritative Source on the State of the Hospital Medicine Movement,” for example, 75% of participants reported caring for patients in the ICU.3
The Committee on Manpower for Pulmonary and Critical Care Societies (COMPACCS) has predicted a 22-35% The Committee on Manpower for Pulmonary and Critical Care Societies (COMPACCS) has predicted a 22-25% shortfall of needed critical care physicians (also called “intensivists”) by 2030. Are hospitalists a viable option to fill the void created by the shortage of intensivists? What is the practice scope of hospitalists in the ICU? Which models work for effective co-management of ICUs and can hospitalists help to deliver round-the-clock coverage in the ICU that the Leapfrog Group safety standards have stipulated should be provided by intensivists?4 According to academic and community-based hospitalists and intensivists, much depends on local demographics and each hospital’s ICU model.
Two Models
Michael A. Gropper, MD, PhD, believes hospitalists are well suited to help manage patients in the critical care unit. At the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where Gropper is a professor, vice chair of the Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care, and the Medical Center’s director of critical care medicine, the ICU uses a co-management system.