Exam Intelligence

Unfortunately, my ISP has managed to cut me off from my web-server, meaning I can’t upload anything at the moment. However, some readers have expressed interest in some Past Viva papers I discovered in my filing cabinet at home, as mentioned in a previous post. If you are interested in seeing them, please email me. Eventually I will be able to upload them, but I don’t hold high hopes of that happening before the middle of next week!

Classic.

Congratulations to all those who passed the Primary MCQ, results of which came out on Thursday!

As anyone who has done this exam will be aware, it is a bugger, but only the first step on the way to becoming FRCA.

Next up is the OSCE and viva, which are also a bugger in a different way. If you want a useful book for this (it has many little tidbits and lots of diagrams you could be expected to reproduce in the exam) consider this one The Anaesthesia Viva: Volume 1, Physiology and Pharmacology and this one: The Anaesthesia Viva: Volume 2, Physics, Clinical Measurement, Safety and Clinical Anaesthesia. Although not perfect, they have helped many people in their preparation for the exam, and I’ve even looked back at it in revising for the Final (though there are better books for this).

For the OSCE examinations, the most popular book is probably this one: Anaesthesia OSCE. I am not sure that there is actually anything else out there at the moment.

Other books I bought and used to revise for the Primary Structured Orals, and useful for the Finals as well were The Clinical Anaesthesia Viva Book and The Anaesthesia Science Viva Book. The latter is probably more use going into Primary, to be honest, and contains a reasonable amount of detail. I didn’t come to these until very late in the day, but I reckon that if you can reproduce some of the stuff in the Science Viva book in the Primary, you’ll be well away.

Anyhow, best of luck!