FYS: Death and Daring in the Modern Intensive Care Unit

3 Credits.

The modern intensive care unit represents an incredible intersection of altruism and commerce, tradition and technologic innovation, humanism and challenges to agency and autonomy. Simple models of individual action scale poorly to explain aggregate behavior of complex institutions. Cynical models of profit-maximization cannot explain the daily willingness to go above and beyond. Deaths, an inevitable part of human existence, are increasingly contained within organizations designed to prolong life at all costs. We propose to introduce first year students simultaneously to: (1) the health, physiology, and technology of massively invasive contemporary “heroic” and life-sustaining therapies; (2) organizational social science to study the multi-billion dollar yet non-profit health sector and how it shapes bedside delivery of care to critically unstable patients (and how that shaping is resisted); (3) scholarship that provides tools for thinking deeply about professional action in the midst of competing values. Using a blend of intensive discussion, small group in-class projects, and introductory teaching, culminating in a brief design of a novel research project, it will prepare students to develop ways to improve our most intensive care of our most vulnerable patients and their families.