Published April 15, 2025 | Updated April 22, 2025
By MedCourse
Useful, relevant, and interesting content for UK Junior Doctors.
About the Author
Mayur Murali, ST7 Intensive Care Medicine & Anaesthetics, London and PhD Student, Imperial College London
I am an ST7 Intensive Care Medicine (ICM) and Anaesthetics Registrar. I have recently completed an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship and started a PhD at Imperial College London in February 2025.
I am Chair of The Pan-London Perioperative Audit & Research Network, have completed a Trainee Editor Fellowship for the journal Anaesthesia, and I’m a Fellow with the South Asian Health Foundation. I have teaching roles with the Imperial School of Anaesthesia and Imperial College London.
Courses & Conferences to Attend
Here are some of the courses I’d recommend for someone interested in training in ICM.
- Level 1 Emergency, Acute & Intensive Care Ultrasound Course
- Advanced Life Support (ALS)
- Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS)
- Advanced Paediatric Life Support (APLS)
- Focused Ultrasound in Intensive Care (FUSIC)
- Newborn Life Support (NLS)
- Transfer Simulation Course
- Bronchoscopy in Intensive Care (BrIC)
- Generic Instructor Course (GIC)
- Simulation “Train the Trainer”
- MSc in Medical Education
- Diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene
I would recommend a combination of courses that complement:
- Clinical skill development (e.g., point of care ultrasound, echocardiography, intensive care medicine postgraduate certificate or diploma)
- Resuscitation skills (e.g., ALS, APLS, ATLS)
- An area of non-clinical interest which you are passionate about, that complements clinical work (e.g., one of medical education, quality improvement, research, global health, leadership).
How to Maximise Your Portfolio
By virtue of being a registrar-entry training programme that accepts trainees from different. clinical backgrounds, ICM allows the development of broad clinical and non-clinical interests before applying.
My top tips are:
Making the Most of Your Day Job
For those without an ICM rotation, arrange a Taster Week. This shows you what the job is really like while demonstrating commitment to the specialty.
Conducting reviews of critically unwell patients in the wards, ED, or theatres uses many of the transferrable skills required for ICM. Make sure you log these cases, either through workplace-based assessments or personal reflection, and what you learned from them. Use your interactions with intensive care doctors and critical care outreach teams to understand what is involved in their criteria for acceptance to intensive care.
Stay organised: you will need to have completed exams in your parent specialty before applying for an ST3 post (MRCP, Primary FRCA, MRCEM or FRCEM Intermediate). Make sure you know when the exam and application windows are, and when is a good time for you to sit an exam (e.g., during a quieter rotation or avoiding life events like weddings or babies).
Talk to ICM trainees to understand what the training programme is really like, including exams, stages of training, special interest areas, anticipated challenges, hot topics, and life as a consultant. This provides valuable intelligence for the interviews, while outlining if the specialty is really for you.
Have a look at the FICMLearning or the Intensive Care Society Learning Portal. You will find blogs, podcasts, webinars, and other useful resources (e.g., FUSIC e-learning modules) that may be of interest to you and develop your understanding of critical care. And importantly, most of the resources are free.
Making the Most of Intensive Care Placements
Make your intention to apply to ICM clear to the whole team, who will be delighted to support you to achieve your goal.
Keep a logbook of cases that you have admitted, ward patients you have reviewed, resuscitations you have been involved with, and procedures undertaken. This demonstrates the breadth of your experience and skills achieved before entering the ICM training programme. The FICM website has some logbook options you can trial.
Complete supervised learning events (SLEs) for interesting cases you are involved with. These can be downloaded from the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine website. Logbooks, SLEs and supervisor reports may reduce the time required to complete Stage 1 ICM, so keeping a contemporaneous record is important!
Take advantage of chances to learn and use clinical skills, for example in point of care ultrasound, echocardiography, or line placement. Some departments will have teaching programmes that support trainees to develop skills, for example FUSIC Heart or Lung. Enquire about these opportunities early and develop these during quiet periods on the Unit (avoid coming in on your days off!).
Lead or take part in an audit, quality improvement or research project while on the ICU. An intensive-care-themed project always looks impressive on an application. Share the workload by teaming up with colleagues. And remember, quality over quantity; it is better to invest in a good quality project than spread yourself too thin.
Attend an ICM conference. A good start is the ICS State of the Art conference; it’s a chance to listen to experts in the field, network, and to present a poster. If you’re looking further afield (and can get the study leave and budget), the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine Annual Congress is another option.
What About Non-ICM Placements?
Maintain enthusiasm and work to a high standard, even in specialties you don’t love; you are rewarded for demonstrating excellence in educational supervisor reports throughout your training in the “Progress through training and excellence” assessment domain, even in specialties that may not seem to have much connection to critical care.
Use the opportunities available to you to develop transferrable skills; remember, identifying fractures on an X-ray, managing complex pain patients, or managing acutely delirious patients will be useful for your intensive care career.
Keep populating those non-clinical domains; a quality improvement or research project in an unrelated specialty will score the same number of points as a critical care-themed project.
