• Pedja Kovacevic, Jadranka Vidovic, Boris Tomic, Jihad Mallat, Ali Ait Hssain, Muyiwa Rotimi, Owoniya Temitope Akindele, Kent Doi, Rajesh Mishra, F Joachim Meyer, Ivan Palibrk, Ranko Skrbic, Enrique Boloña, Oguz Kilickaya, and Ognjen Gajic.
• Medical Intensive Care Unit, University Clinical Centre of the Republic of Srpska, 78000, Banja Luka, The Republic of Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. pedja.kovacevic@med.unibl.org.
• Crit Care. 2024 Oct 3; 28 (1): 323323.

BackgroundThe inadequacy of intensive care medicine in low-resource settings (LRS) has become significantly more visible after the COVID-19 pandemic. Recommendations for establishing medical critical care are scarce and rarely include expert clinicians from LRS.MethodsIn December 2023, the National Association of Intensivists from Bosnia and Herzegovina organized a hybrid international conference on the topic of organizational structure of medical critical care in LRS. The conference proceedings and literature review informed expert statements across several domains. Following the conference, the statements were distributed via an online survey to conference participants and their wider professional network using a modified Delphi methodology. An agreement of ≥ 80% was required to reach a consensus on a statement.ResultsOut of the 48 invited clinicians, 43 agreed to participate. The study participants came from 20 countries and included clinician representatives from different base specialties and health authorities. After the two rounds, consensus was reached for 13 out of 16 statements across 3 domains: organizational structure, staffing, and education. The participants favored multispecialty medical intensive care units run by a medical team with formal intensive care training. Recognition and support by health care authorities was deemed critical and the panel underscored the important roles of professional organizations, clinician educators trained in high-income countries, and novel technologies such as tele-medicine and tele-education.ConclusionDelphi process identified a set of consensus-based statements on how to create a sustainable patient-centered medical intensive care in LRS.© 2024. The Author(s).

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