“How Are We Getting Her Off the Ventilator?”

Summary: Dr. Snigdha Jain, a critical care doctor at Yale, believes that doing "more" isn’t always better medicine. In the high-pressure world of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), medical teams often fall into a rhythm of adding more tests and medicines to be safe. However, Dr. Jain teaches that true excellence means pausing to ask if a patient still needs those treatments. By asking her team, "How are we getting her off the ventilator?" she shifted their focus from merely treating pneumonia to actively helping a patient breathe on her own again. Now, as a scholar with the National Academy of Medicine, she is researching how to help older adults recover fully and teaching young doctors that it is okay to embrace uncertainty.

For more details, see NAM at nam.edu/news-and-insights/critical-care-physician-advances-diagnostic-excellence-fellowship/ (opens in new tab)