That's actually the exact pathway I'm considering right now. If I wind up liking the ICU in residency, I will definitely pursue it.
The role of the anesthesiologist is evolving from being just the doctor who puts you to sleep to becoming a true perioperative physician that is able to take care of all aspects of surgical patients before, during, and after surgery (besides doing the surgery, of course). I think that will manifest itself in that anesthesiology groups will be getting contracts to staff the ICUs in private hospitals, and will actually need to be able to provide those services to win the contracts.
I haven't asked around enough yet to get a great idea of how it would affect your practice after residency. I get the feeling a lot of CC trained anesthesiologists stay in academics. Ideally, for me, having that training would enable me to split my time in a private practice setting between the OR providing anesthesia and the ICU doing critical care (say, 1 week per month in the SICU, rest of time in the OR).
What I need to find out is if critical care training makes you more marketable to private practice groups. Doing critical care is certainly not as lucrative as the traditional role of the anesthesiologist. I've heard one resident say that it's "one more year of training to get paid less." With my desire to do a mix of the two, I just want to make sure it would be worthwhile to get that training, rather than finding out later that groups don't care about the CC stuff.
Not sure exactly what you are asking about the patient population. In an academic setting, CC-trained anesthesiologists mostly staff SICUs, leaving the MICU to Internal Medicine docs who have generally completed Pulmonary and CC fellowhsips. Outside of academics, though, I don't think there are many community hospitals that have separate surgical and medical ICUs, although they might separate out just based on who is treating you like the VA's ICU.
Hope that rambling helps. It's mostly based on wild speculation on my inexperienced part, so don't take it too seriously.
I actually watched Married with Children with my parents. We loved that show.
