Best Children's Hospitals US News & World Report 2025-26
World's Best Specialized Hospitals Newsweek 2026

Overview

With 35 faculty and 18 fellows, the Division of Critical Care Medicine (CCM) has internationally recognized clinical care, training, and research programs. Six CCM faculty are full professors at Harvard Medical School, and five hold chairs at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

Clinical practice

CCM’s primary clinical practice is the Medical-Surgical Intensive Care Unit (MSICU), the highest volume pediatric intensive care unit in the Northeast. The MSICU completed its expansion to 54 beds, on two floors, in 2025. The MSICU provides care for critically ill infants and children across the full range of medical and surgical conditions, including one of the nation’s first and highest volume Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) programs. The institutional ECMO program is an Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO)-designated Platinum Level Center of Excellence. The MSICU has specific programmatic expertise in the care of patients with neurologic and neurosurgical conditions, oncologic diseases (including hematopoietic (stem) cell transplant recipients), and complex surgical conditions such as congenital diaphragmatic hernia, esophageal atresia, trauma, and solid organ transplant. The MSICU team is responsible for institutional rapid and code response, and critical care triage for regional and national referrals.

Innovative and collaborative models

  • CCM has a unique collaboration with the Department of Surgery: a combined Surgical Critical Care service that fuses all clinical and educational domains within one critical care program. This includes three surgeons, trained in surgical critical care, who provide attending coverage in the MSICU over 24 weeks of the year.
  • The MSICU is also the designated location for provision of interdisciplinary, advanced, and innovative neurocritical care (NCC). Patients requiring NCC are cared for on 8 Berthiaume in the MSICU, with collaborative care provided by dedicated intensivists, advanced practice providers, neurointensive care neurologist consultants, neurosurgeons, neurooncologists, and neurointerventional radiology experts.
  • The MSICU group has historically included multiple faculty who are dual trained in anesthesia and critical care medicine. Currently, four dual-trained faculty provide daytime service and nighttime coverage in the MSICU. This model provides seamless collaboration between the Divisions of Critical Care and Perioperative Medicine.

Other hospital programs that are led by members of the division's critical care faculty include:

Training and education

With more than 75 trainees completing rotations in the MSICU each year, including Harvard Medical School students, Boston Children’s pediatric residents, and fellows in critical care, surgical critical care, pediatric emergency medicine, and pediatric anesthesia, CCM maintains an active postgraduate medical education program. The division’s fellowship program in pediatric critical care is one of the nation’s first and most sought-after, with 18 fellows. Fellows in the program are offered focused experiences in procedural sedation, ultrasound training, transport medicine, neurocritical care, and ECMO, in addition to a comprehensive curriculum on critical illness and injury.

Innovation

Faculty from the Division of Critical Care Medicine created Boston Children’s hospital-wide Immersive Design Systems, devoted to inter-professional training, systems testing, healthcare networking, and three-dimensional engineering to develop the most advanced simulation activities. Faculty from the division also created and lead the OPENPediatrics program, an online medical education website currently in use in more than 145 countries across the world. OPENPediatrics delivers high-quality, peer-reviewed multidisciplinary education content on the care of critical illness in children and is based on a research collaboration with experts on adult learning from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Research

CCM faculty have active research programs across the domains of basic, translational, clinical, outcomes, medical education, and medical ethics. Eight current faculty are National Institutes of Health-funded; one is funded by the Department of Defense.

Innovation

CCM faculty have internationally recognized research programs including the largest CDC-sponsored pediatric COVID-19 research network, the biomaterials and drug delivery laboratory, a laboratory focusing on bacterial pathogens and vaccine development, a translation program in the immunobiology of critical illness in children, and the perioperative and critical care outcome center. A CCM faculty member founded the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigators Network in 2002. It is the largest pediatric clinical-translational research consortium and now has collaborators from 80 pediatric intensive care units across the U.S. and Canada.