Watch: Dr. Ashwin Krishna treats every patient like his own child

This week, we talked to Dr. Ashwin Krishna, director of respiratory care for the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at Kentucky Children's Hospital. The PICU team treats and monitors critically ill children and can care for a wide range of problems, including burns, trauma injuries, cardiovascular surgery and neurosurgery. Krishna is also an assistant professor of pediatrics in the UK College of Medicine.

Why did you decide to study medicine?

I’ve always been a science nerd. I’ve been interested in the delivery of science and the use of scientific knowledge. It seemed like a natural fit. Plus, you get to work with a large group of people of different specialties, different backgrounds. I think that was really appealing to me.

What do you enjoy about teaching?

I really enjoy challenging younger doctors to refine their knowledge and really cultivate them into being the pediatricians that we want to put out into this community.

What advice would you give to parents whose children are in the PICU?

It’s difficult to see it in real time when you’re there moment-to-moment, but it’s not a fast race – it’s a marathon. We are dedicated to making the children under our care better, but sometimes it takes time. We just have to rely on time as one of our medicines and one of our therapies.

What's your patient care philosophy?

I have a wife who’s expecting, so I’ll be a father very soon, but when I’m on service for the week, those are my kids. I adopt kids, I guess you could say. They become my kids, and that’s really important to me. I think it’s one of my crucial responsibilities to be able to get children out of the ICU as healthy as possible and get over their acute illness.

Watch our interview with Dr. Ashwin Krishna where he explains more about what inspires him to treat kids.