Section 2.1.19 in the second edition of the CICM Syllabus for the Second Part Examination handles the impossible task of defining an examinable itinerary of essential ICU procedures and equipment. To some, it may seem excessively long and vague, and to others, irresponsibly narrow and prescriptive. One needs to point out that the examiners' intention here was clearly not to catalogue every possible and impossible gadget into a comprehensive encyclopedia. The items collected into the syllabus are supposed to be the basic standard for a safe junior intensivist about to finish their training and to be released into the community.
Of course, historically, this was not the case. In all probability there was fundamentally no specific standard other than what a random examiner decided was important. Procedures and equipment were therefore a historically depraved and lawless province, strewn with exotic devices and obscure ICU rituals, across which roamed noisy herds of opinionated professors. Anything and everything was possible. It would not have been unexpected to arrive into a viva booth to be confronted by an Elder Intensivist, their sensory filaments waving menacingly over an array of different dialysis filters and haemoperfusion cartridges. "Describe the Performance Characteristics of these Devices", they enjoin, injecting the stem directly into your limbic system. It is no wonder that Carole Foote's excellent book, dating to the same time period, contains equipment chapters covering oesophageal Dopplers, umbilical lines, Mini-jets™ and other similar archaeotech.
Therefore, those fortunate candidates who operate in this enlightened modern era should in fact be reassured by the discretely finite array of devices and procedures described by the Syllabus. The people who restrict their revision to these syllabus items will have the body of knowledge considered sufficient. This little chapter is intended as a "Wrong Way / Go Back" road sign, to redirect the reader who continues through the chapters below, thinking that they are somehow essential. They are works representing a level of detail which was either never expected, or which has become obsolete, or has been migrated to the First Part Exam, or which has been redeveloped into something better in another section. They remain here mostly for historical interest, and because some of the summary chapters above tend to reference them in passing.