Critical care reasoning, close to the bedside.
ESICM Talk is a clinical education series built around intensive care questions that matter after the ward round is over. Episodes move from nutrition, AKI, ARDS, consciousness, rehabilitation, and antibiotics into the evidence, measurements, and tradeoffs behind daily ICU decisions.
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ESICM Talk is an intensive care education series centered on clinical reasoning. It is built less like a polished lecture feed and more like a moderated expert conversation. A typical episode begins with a concrete ICU problem, then follows that problem into mechanisms, measurements, outcomes, and the limits of available evidence. The result is technical, brisk, and explicitly bedside-oriented. Precision nutrition is treated through endpoints, study design, metabolic markers, and what can actually be measured in critically ill patients. Acute kidney injury is discussed not only as a short-term event, but as a possible driver of long-term vulnerability, maladaptive repair, fibrosis, and reduced renal reserve. ARDS episodes return repeatedly to physiology, respiratory mechanics, guidelines, and the value of touching the patient rather than staring only at protocolized data. Rehabilitation and post-ICU follow-up episodes widen the lens to physical function, cognition, mental health, sleep, pain, nutrition, and recovery after critical illness. Prehabilitation appears as a multidisciplinary effort involving nutrition, exercise, cognitive work, smoking cessation, metabolic optimization, and psychological preparation for high-risk patients. Infection-focused discussions examine antibiotic exposure, therapeutic drug monitoring, model-based dosing, continuous infusion, vancomycin, and kidney safety. Neurocritical care episodes consider covert consciousness, functional MRI, motor imagery tasks, and the difficult boundary between observable responsiveness and brain activity. The show is often hosted by members of the NEXT committee, with collaborators from ESICM sections and invited specialists carrying much of the analysis. Its best quality is the way it keeps returning from abstraction to practice. It asks what intensivists can prevent, measure, modify, or follow after discharge. It also acknowledges that ideal endpoints and real ICU data rarely line up neatly. The language is medically dense, but the editorial center is plain: better care depends on better questions. ESICM Talk serves clinicians who are comfortable with physiology, pharmacology, outcomes research, and the slow work of translating evidence into decisions at the bedside.
Made for: Designed for intensivists, anesthesiologists, ICU pharmacists, critical care nurses, trainees, and medically fluent listeners who want specialist discussion of ICU practice. It best suits people comfortable with technical language and evidence-focused reasoning.
What sets it apart: The show connects frontline ICU questions to physiology, study design, pharmacology, recovery, and patient outcomes without sanding off complexity. Its conversations are driven by clinicians and researchers working through what can realistically be done in critical care settings.
European Society of Intensive Medicine Talks
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
ESICM Talk connects intensive care evidence to bedside decisions while keeping long-term recovery and meaningful patient outcomes in view.
ESICM Talk turns intensive care medicine into a focused exchange between clinicians who know the bedside and researchers prepared to defend the evidence.
A vancomycin drip meets a kidney-risk calculation, if that's your idea of a good conversation.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical, tightly argued look at how nutrition science survives the ICU.
The piece treats precision nutrition as a bedside question: what can be measured, and which outcomes should guide clinical judgment. It stays close to ICU practice, moving through urea, creatinine, glucose, and indirect calorimetry before asking whether those markers really…
AKI recovery is treated as part of critical care, not an afterthought.
This episode pushes past immediate AKI treatment and treats long-term recovery as part of critical care, not a side issue. It keeps the focus on what matters at the bedside and on the longer arc of what patients and intensivists may face after the acute phase.
A clear look at why ICU survival is only the start of recovery.
Post-ICU care is presented as a defined pathway rather than an afterthought. Ekaterina Jagodzinska and Ahmed Zahar set up the discussion, and Professor Anne-Francoise Wazou, intensivist and head of the Post-ICU Follow-Up Clinic at University Hospital Liege, lays out…
A technical ICU discussion of antibiotic dosing that keeps returning to the bedside.
This episode takes on a practical ICU problem: antibiotics are often difficult to dose predictably in very sick patients, and it looks at what therapeutic drug monitoring and model-based dosing can actually change.
A physiology-first ICU conversation for listeners who want medicine kept close to the patient.
ARDS stays central here, but the stronger thread is how Professor Gattinoni returns the discussion to physiology and measurement in intensive care.
Practical anesthesia safety, one case at a time.
Surgery, mentorship, and life in training.
Clear conversations on bones, joints, and recovery.
The episode centers on precision nutrition at the patient bedside.
The episode looks at long-term outcomes after acute kidney injury.
This episode discusses the Kids in a CU project, focusing on child-friendly visiting policies in intensive care units, with insights from healthcare professionals on its origins and importance.
This episode explores covert consciousness, a state in patients with chronic disorders of consciousness, as discussed by Professor Jan Klaassen in a neurointensive care context.
This episode discusses prehabilitation in the ICU, focusing on preventing post-intensive care syndrome through early rehabilitation strategies for critically ill patients.
The podcast opens with Ekaterina Jagodzinska and Ahmed Zahar introducing Professor Anne-Francoise Wazou, head of a post-ICU follow-up clinic in Liege.
The episode starts with a basic ICU problem: antibiotics that may not reach enough exposure, and whether dose optimization actually matters.
ESICM Talk’s "Diving into ARDS with Prof.
This episode interviews the lead authors of new international guidelines for managing severe community-acquired pneumonia, discussing their development and key clinical implications.
This podcast episode features a discussion between host Ahmed Zahir and Prof.
This episode discusses a machine learning-derived sepsis bundle of care paper published in Intensive Care Medicine Journal, exploring its motivation and impact on ICU mortality.
This episode features an interview with Professor Pedro Povua discussing a narrative review on how clinicians can use biomarkers of infection and sepsis at the bedside, covering pathogen-specific and host response biomarkers.