"Haemodynamic monitoring", the L1 topic c from Section 2.1.4 in the second edition of the CICM Syllabus for the Second Part Examination, does a massive amount of heavy lifting for such a little L1 topic item. Along similar lines as the mechanical ventilation and airway management topics from the "Respiratory Intensive Care" section, it is as if the body of examiners writing the syllabus had been compelled to limit the number of sections to 27, and could not bring themselves to create new categories.
There are numerous pre-syllabus SAQs that could be retrospectively attributed to "haemodynamic monitoring", most of which were originally distributed to Intensive Care Procedures:
The gen Z CICM exam candidate who scrolled to the end of this list will surely have exhaled their vape with a heavy sigh, asking: what do we care of the exams in the year 2000, when many of the current trainee cohort were experiencing nappy rash? Future colleagues, the examiners of CICM likely have these SAQs on hand, and likely know that though there has been twenty six years since the first appearance of the PA catheter in the available papers, the pulmonary artery catheter has remained a fixture of ICU monitoring practices throughout that time, and when one appears after a long absence in a unit that does not usually have them, all eyes turn to the intensivist for the expertise in their use.
On the basis of this it would be reasonable to expect any of these topics to make an appearance in this exit exam for our specialty.
What remains murky is exactly how much of this is physiology or physics on such a pure level that it could be safely relegated to the First Part, and how much is clinically oriented senior material. Unfortunately, the author of these pages was left to distribute these resources without guidance in the bleak pre-syllabus era, which resulted in a considerable amount of this material being migrated to the Cardiovascular System section in the First Part Exam notes; but he experiences no guilt about this, given that it is effortless for the reader to follow a link.
With so many possible topics, and even predictable SAQs falling into a large range, how does one bring this together for the time CICM exam candidate? It would be possible to borrow a structure from Oh's Manual, where "Haemodynamic Monitoring" has been a chapter since the Middle Pleistocene, when primitive intensivists were intubating people using the jawbone of a Smilodon as a laryngoscope. In the ninth edition, it is Chapter 24. Recurring elements have been included consistently in this work, and these are presented here as a list of items with links to local resources where there is more information.