The Neurocritical Care Society (NCS) is an international, multidisciplinary medical society first established in 2002. The Society is dedicated to improving the care and outcomes of patients with life-threatening neurologic illnesses in the intensive care unit. Common illnesses requiring neurocritical care include ischemic stroke, subarachnoid hemorrhage, intracranial hemorrhage, traumatic brain and spinal cord injury, coma, and status epilepticus. Its members are health professionals providing care to critically ill and injured patients. The Society supports research and education, and advocates on issues related to neurointensive care, neurocritical care, and general critical care.
The society's headquarters is located in Chicago, Illinois. Although a great percentage of the members are healthcare practitioners are in the US, the society is international and includes members from multiple healthcare disciplines all over the world
History
The Neurocritical Care Society was formed in 2002 with Thomas P Bleck MD MCCM as the founding president. It has expanded to a current membership in excess of 1000 members. NCS is an interdisciplinary society, with membership roles spanning multiple physician disciplines, nursing, advanced practice providers, pharmacists and other allied health providers who specialize in the care of patients with severe neurological illness. In the early years, the path to physician board certification in neurocritical care often involved dual residency training in neurology as well as internal medicine because critical care experience was not available to neurology residents. Fellowship training in neurocritical care now constitutes a minimum of two years with focused training in general critical care and neurologic critical care. Neurocritical care as a subspecialty was accepted in the USA by the United Council of Neurological Subspecialties (UCNS) in 2006. The first neurocritical care board examination was held in 2007, and currently there are over a 1000 certified diplomates. The American Board of Medical Specialties approved a subspecialty certification examination in neurocritical care in 2019, to be administered by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Diplomates of the member boards in neurology, neurological surgery, anesthesiology, emergency medicine, surgery, and internal medicine with the requisite training or experience in neurocritical care will be eligible to sit for the inaugural examination in 2021 .
Conferences
The first annual conference was held in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2003 and has continued annually since then. The 18th was conducted virtually, and the 19th Annual Meeting is scheduled to be held in Chicago in October 2021.
Guidelines
The Neurocritical Care Society has published multiple evidence-based, peer-reviewed scientific guidelines on the management of different disease states within neurocritical care that are available for medical practitioners worldwide. These guidelines are available at .
Publications
The Neurocritical Care Society began publication of the Neurocritical Care Journal in Spring 2004, with Eelco Wijdicks MD as the Editor-in-Chief. Michael Diringer MD is the current editor-in-chief.
Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness. Contemporary medicine applies biomedical sciences, biomedical research, genetics, and medical technology to diagnose, treat, and prevent injury and disease, typically through pharmaceuticals or surgery, but also through therapies as diverse as psychotherapy, external splints and traction, medical devices, biologics, and ionizing radiation, amongst others.
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Anesthesiology is the medical specialty concerned with the total perioperative care of patients before, during and after surgery. It encompasses anesthesia, intensive care medicine, critical emergency medicine, and pain medicine. A physician specialized in anesthesiology is called an anesthesiologist. There are different ways of referring to the field of anesthesiology and physicians who specialize in it depending on the region of the world.
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A Fellowship is the period of medical training, in the United States and Canada, that a physician, dentist, or veterinarian may undertake after completing a specialty training program (residency). During this time, the physician is known as a fellow. Fellows are capable of acting as an attending physician or a consultant physician in the specialist field in which they were trained, such as Internal Medicine or Pediatrics. After completing a fellowship in the relevant sub-specialty, the physician is permitted to practice without direct supervision by other physicians in that sub-specialty, such as Cardiology or Oncology.
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Clinicians routinely check the pupils of critically injured and ill patients to monitor neurological status. However, manual pupil measurements have been shown to be subjective, inaccurate, and not repeatable or consistent. Automated assessment of the pupillary light reflex has emerged as an objective means of measuring pupillary reactivity across a range of neurological diseases, including stroke, traumatic brain injury and edema, tumoral herniation syndromes, and sports or war injuries. Automated pupillometers are used to assess an array of objective pupillary variables including size, constriction velocity, latency, and dilation velocity, which are normalized and standardized to compute an indexed score such as the Neurological Pupil index (NPi).
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