Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine
The Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine at Peking University Shenzhen Hospital was established when the hospital was founded in 1999. It was initially named the Department of Respiratory Medicine, approved as a master’s degree-granting discipline in 2003, and renamed the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine in 2019. In 2019, it was recognized as an outstanding national institution for the development of respiratory and critical care medicine, and was one of 2 outstanding institutions in Shenzhen.
The Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine currently has 2 inpatient wards and 58 fixed beds. It also includes a comprehensive respiratory outpatient diagnosis and treatment center, a sleep-related respiratory disease diagnosis and treatment center, a respiratory endoscopy room, a pulmonary function laboratory, and a photodynamic therapy darkroom; the respiratory intensive care unit has 8 beds. The department has a complete range of subspecialties, including chronic airway diseases, sleep-related respiratory diseases, interventional pulmonology, lung cancer, interstitial lung disease, and pulmonary vascular disease.
The Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine has an excellent medical, research, and teaching team. It currently has a total of 40 medical and nursing staff members, including 6 chief physicians/professors, 7 deputy chief physicians/associate professors, 3 attending physicians, and 2 resident physicians; among them, 6 hold medical doctorates, 3 hold master’s degrees, there is 1 postdoctoral fellow currently in residence, and there are more than 20 nursing staff members. It has advanced resuscitation and diagnostic equipment, including invasive and noninvasive ventilators, diagnostic and therapeutic bronchoscopes in multiple models, endobronchial ultrasound, a bronchoscopy navigation system, thoracoscopes, cryotherapy equipment, laser knives, electrosurgical knives, high-flow nasal oxygen therapy machines, defibrillators, and other equipment.
The Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine has gradually developed a distinctive profile centered on chronic airway diseases (asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), interventional pulmonology (bronchoscopy and thoracoscopy), pulmonary infectious diseases, and lung cancer. In the area of chronic airway diseases, it has conducted a series of clinical and basic studies on the diagnosis and treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and is a national benchmark hospital for chronic disease management. In interventional pulmonology, it has introduced painless bronchoscopy and general anesthesia with endotracheal intubation, endobronchial ultrasound examination, and lymph-node needle biopsy (EBUS+TBNA), as well as bronchoscopic interventional treatment techniques, including photodynamic therapy, high-frequency electrosurgery, cryotherapy, laser treatment, argon knives, balloon dilation, stent implantation, occluder placement, bronchial thermoplasty, medical lung-volume reduction, and other intraluminal airway interventions. These treatments relieve benign and malignant airway stenoses caused by tumors, foreign bodies, infections, and other conditions. The department also provides interventional respiratory treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma and participated in formulating the national expert consensus on respiratory endoscopy. It has also developed medical thoracoscopy techniques for diagnosis and treatment, helping patients with pleural diseases obtain accurate diagnoses and appropriate treatment.
In the future, the department will continue to strengthen its clinical and research capabilities, focus on cultivating 2-3 advantageous discipline groups and advancing frontier technologies, and prioritize the development of respiratory chronic disease diagnosis, treatment, and management technologies, comprehensive diagnosis and treatment of sleep-related respiratory diseases, and the construction of an integrated lung nodule–lung cancer diagnosis and treatment center. It will actively participate in the development of provincial- and municipal-level major disease prevention and control systems and become a leading institution in this field in the region.