Procedure Station
Candidates were expected to provide a systematic approach to the management of a cardiac arrest in a pregnant patient. The scenario provided was as follows:
“You are about to meet with the wife of a patient who was admitted with life threatening head injuries to the Intensive Care Unit and who has been declared dead after 30 min of CPR. You are about to break the news to his wife (who was not involved in the accident). She is 36 weeks pregnant.
As you are preparing to enter the room, you are called urgently as the wife has dropped off from the chair and has become unresponsive.”
Nineteen out of twenty-two candidates passed this station.
Disclaimer: the viva stem above may be an original CICM stem, acquired from their publicly available past papers. Or, perhaps it is a slightly altered version of the original CICM stem. Or, it is a completely original viva stem, concocted by the monstrously amoral author of Deranged Physiology for nothing more than his own personal amusement. In either case, because the college do not make the main viva text or marking criteria available, almost everything here has been confabulated. It might sound like a plausible viva and it could be used for the purpose of practice, but all should be aware that it does not represent the "true" canonical CICM viva station.