Ken Tegtmeyer, MD, FAAP, FCCM, is a pediatric intensivist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. He became a member of the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) in 1996, is a past cochair of the Congress Program Committee, and has been involved in numerous committees during his membership. His clinical interests include pediatrics, quality and patient safety, and resuscitation. In his free time, you’ll find him traveling, working out, and enjoying movies. Learn more about Dr. Tegtmeyer and his thoughts on critical care.
Why do you love being in critical care?
I love that even after 30 years in pediatric critical care I can still learn something new almost every day, that we are privileged to care for patients and their families at a vulnerable time, and that we can see the impacts of our actions in real time.
How did you get into critical care?
Kind of funny, I was undecided until Denise M. Goodman, MD, MS, FCCM, my attending physician when I started my third-year pediatric intensive care unit (ICU) rotation, asked the residents a question that stuck with me. She asked the other two, “When you're a general pediatrician, how will you approach this?” When she got to me, she started her question with, “And Ken, when you're a PICU fellow, . . .” That was my first inkling.
At the time, my wife was a year behind me in training, and we had an infant, so I needed to find something to do for a year. Our program had a lot of turnover, so I agreed to do a year of critical care. By the end of my first week, I knew it was what I wanted to do, and I haven't looked back.
What is your biggest professional achievement?
This is tough. Cochairing the 2025 Critical Care Congress with Corinna Sicoutris, DNP, AGACNP-BC, MSN, FCCM, and Kwame A. Akuamoah-Boateng, DNP, ACNP-BC, FCCM, was a ton of work and so worthwhile watching it come to fruition. I've also been lucky to publish eight videos in the New England Journal of Medicine.
What advice do you have for those starting their critical care careers?
Realize you'll never know it all. You work as part of a great team, so there are always going to be opportunities to learn from each other and teach, whether you're in a large academic practice or a smaller community-based hospital with no trainees. Part of training and early career is building that community of mentors and mentees that you can call upon when things are tricky, and you should continue to take advantage of that.
What do you see as the most challenging issue facing critical care?
I think we missed the boat during the pandemic and lost the dialog around what we as critical care practitioners do. It was an opportunity to better educate the public about things such as mechanical ventilation and limited ICU resources, as well as the role public health can play in decreasing ICU demand. I believe, because of this, the actual need for critical care will grow.
What are the top advances in critical care since you started your career?
So many things: vaccines for varicella, meningococcemia (especially type B, which wasn't covered by the vaccine when I lived in Oregon), Haemophilus influenzae, COVID-19, and now respiratory syncytial virus have all dramatically changed the patient population. As a quaternary care PICU doc, the evolution of management of bone marrow transplant lung disease has gone from certain mortality to dramatically improved survival from respiratory failure.
What industry trends excite you about the future?
I'm excited by some really fundamental changes with great impact, particularly around the potential for shared situational awareness and prediction of deterioration that can lead to preventive mitigation planning to reduce ICU morbidity and mortality. I think we're just beginning to tackle the issue, and there is so much potential.
What do you love about SCCM membership?
I love SCCM because of the focus on critical care rather than a specific organ system. We care for the whole patient, and their families, at their most vulnerable. And SCCM recognizes this is a team sport, so collaborating with my nursing, pharmacist, respiratory therapy, and research colleagues is at the core of what SCCM is all about.
Connect with @Ken Tegtmeyer on SCCM Connect!