Critical care medicine in 2050: less invasive, more connected, and personalized

The specialty of critical care medicine can perhaps be said to date back as far as the 1850s when Florence Nightingale famously separated more seriously ill patients from other patients to bring them nearer to the nurses’ station where they could be watched more closely. This model was adopted during the Second World War, notably in the postoperative care of military casualties requiring surgery. In the 1950s, greater use of mechanical ventilation outside the operating room, notably during and subsequent to the polio epidemics in some parts of Europe and the US, was associated with the need for specific areas to be set aside with the necessary equipment and specially trained staff. Coinciding with increased availability and complexity of monitoring equipment, intensive care units (ICUs) began to be created in countries around the world to care for the critically ill. Finally, in 1980, critical care medicine was recognized as a subspecialty in its own right in the US and soon after in multiple other countries. Postgraduate training programs in critical care medicine are now widely established, although they vary markedly in duration, content, and assessment techniques