Intensive Care Specialist
What the work is
Investigates, diagnoses and treats patients in need of intensive and critical care.
Would you enjoy the work?
These are the main tasks in the official description. Mark how each one sounds to you.
- Examines and manages critically ill patients with life-threatening organ system failure, those at risk of clinical deterioration, as well as those requiring resuscitation
- Manages patients in an intensive care or high dependency unit, and maintains precise patient records
- Monitors and adjusts ventilation settings for patients on life support, and prescribes and administers medications and treatments
- Requests laboratory tests and diagnostic procedures, and analyses results with other medical information to make diagnoses
- Oversees end-of-life care and the diagnosis of brain death
Try it
A simulation and a case study from this kind of work, set in a hospital ward and outpatient clinic where specialist physicians see older adults. They are fictional.
The kind of days you could have
Good days
- A puzzling set of symptoms suddenly makes sense and the right treatment starts
- An older patient goes home to the place they love, with the right support
- A junior doctor you teach asks a question you had not thought of
Hard days
- Families who disagree with each other, and with the patient, about what should happen next
- Pressure to free up a bed when the person in it is not yet ready to leave
- Conversations about what matters most that nobody is eager to have
Written by Career Calling as a general guide. Real roles vary by employer and place.
Work a mission
Step into a simulated workplace in this field, with a brief from your manager.
Description and tasks: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Occupation Standard Classification for Australia, 2024, Version 1.0 (opens another site), occupation 264337, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The skill guide above is our plain English summary.