Caring for critically ill patients undergoing mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit (ICU) is an immense challenge for clinicians. Interventions to maintain physiological stability and life itself can cause a number of adverse side effects that significantly impact patients beyond the period of critical illness or injury. These ICU-acquired conditions include but are not limited to weakness, depression, and post-ICU syndrome. These conditions significantly impact the quality of life for our patients after they leave the ICU.

How best to manage the plethora of symptoms experienced by patients receiving mechanical ventilation without contributing to adverse ICU-acquired sequelae remains a daunting charge for clinicians and requires “out of the box” approaches to address this complex issue. Systematic, cutting-edge research is needed to challenge the “usual” way of managing patients in order to provide the best available evidence for practice integration that minimizes adverse ICU-acquired sequelae and improves outcomes for our...

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