The Johns Hopkins Fellowship in Neurocritical Care

Neurocritical care as a subspecialty has grown rapidly over the last 15 years with the advent of newer monitoring and diagnostic and therapeutic modalities in a variety of brain and spinal cord injury paradigms. Fellowship training in Neurosciences Critical Care at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has been in place for more than 18 years. Education and research are an integral part of providing a continuing service to acutely ill neuroscience patients at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (JHMI).

The Neurosciences Critical Care Unit (NCCU) at Johns Hopkins was initially established to manage particular subsets of neurological and neurosurgical patients. It functions following a “closed ICU” model where the ICU team directs all medical management. In over 21 years of operation, the population of patients in the NCCU has diversified to include any critically ill patient with multi-system disease and neurological dysfunction.

Due to the increasing demand for NCCU services, we have recently expanded to a new state-of-the art 22-bed unit. The unit is completely staffed and equipped as a critical care area, having routinely a 1:2 nurse-to-patient ratio, resident and fellow coverage and staffed by an attending faculty member. The patient population in the NCCU comprises patients that are medically or neurologically unstable from the specialty areas of neurology, neurosurgery, ortho-spine and neuroradiology. In addition to the 22-bed unit at The Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH), there is also an 8-bed NCCU at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center (JHBMC) Both units are staffed by NCCU faculty/resident teams and provide care for critically ill neurological and neurosurgical patients.