Intensive care - mortality, morality, and ministry.

Modern intensive care is characterised by sophisticated life-support technologies, potent drugs, and intensive monitoring. Today, up to 75% of ICU patients survive, demonstrating the effectiveness of the specialty. Scoring systems and imaging modalities can help clinicians make decisions about who to admit to the ICU. But up to 80% of ICU survivors experience components of the post-intensive care syndrome, and up to a third never go back to work. To add, research on understanding who might benefit most from intensive care is woefully inadequate. Furthermore, intensive care is extremely costly to provider and global inequalities are stark. Such issues raise deeper questions about decision-making in intensive care, what success looks like, and the balance between the science and the art of medicine. This talk will provide a brief overview of modern intensive care medicine, explore some dilemmas in life support, and encourage a more holistic and realistic approach to intensive care. It highlights some ongoing uncertainties in this specialty, and refocuses on the human and relational aspects of care. 

Mark ZY Tan is a Singaporean anaesthetics and intensive care medicine doctor based in Northwest England. His clinical interests include point-of-care ultrasound and post-ICU care. He is also a researcher and an award-winning author. Accolades include prizes for the Next Generation Short Story award (health/wellbeing), the Doctors for the NHS essay competition, the Health Education England essay competition, and the Anesthesia History Association's essay contest. His debut book Scars & Stains: Lessons from Intensive Care was published in 2024. He is currently working on a book exploring the use of art in intensive care.