Pediatric Critical Care Physician, University of Colorado School of Medicine

>> So my name is Ryan Jackson, and I'm a pediatric critical care doctor at the University of Colorado and Children's Hospital of Colorado. And so my days are split. Some days, I'm working as a clinical doctor in the ICU at the hospital. Other days, I'm doing more education and research on the academic side at the University. So in our hospital, we have a 32-bed ICU, and we have several doctors at the hospital at any time covering all those patients. So my role in the morning is to go in and actually round on all those patients and come up with a plan for the day, what we're going to do to try and get those kids healthy and able to leave the ICU. And then, the afternoon is really spent dealing with new admissions, talking to families and patients about what we're doing that day, how things are going, what steps we're making, what needs to be changed. I also work some overnights where I do similar things, kind of walking around putting out fires and helping new patients to get accustomed to the unit and get started on a plan to heal them. Ideally, we try to have a structure, and most days, it works out pretty well. So I get to the hospital about 7:00 in the morning, spend an hour, hour and a half, kind of going through what happened overnight with the people who were on as well as going through all the computer, lab work, and data that was collected overnight. From about 8:30 until 11:00, we're actually rounding in the unit, so walking from bedside to bedside, talking to the family members, the nurses, the other people on my team that I'm supervising, so residents and students. And that part of the day is usually pretty structured. The afternoon is much less structured and has a lot more running. One of the good and bad things about being an ICU doctor is that you also go to any bad thing that is happening in the hospital, so if a patient who is not in the ICU gets sick, or a patient who is in the ICU gets sick, you're the one who is running to their bedside to try and resuscitate them. So that can happen anytime day or night and can really throw a wrench into how the day is working.