The value of a multi-disciplinary team in critical care.

Intensive care medicine is a broadly based discipline. Critically ill patients follow an all too similar "common final pathway" whatever illness initially precipitates their condition. No one individual can be "all things to all patients", and the intensivist finds her/himself practising with a "foot in the door" of many sub-specialties and thus needing to integrate his/her input. Our health care system cannot sustain the demands of many parallel intensive care units, each based on an organ system or traditional specialty and each providing competitive services within the same hospital. The pressures for improved patient care, more effective intra-physician co-operation and more efficient use of resources make it imperative that we provide a multi-disciplinary team in our intensive care units. The need for increasing numbers of undifferentiated physicians to provide bedside in-hospital care may revitalize the role of the family physician in acute-care hospital units.