Exam Intelligence

My friend Tash showed me a neat little trick. Some of you probably do this anyway…

Take a sheet of A4, and divide it up into sections for History and Examination, Investigations, Bloods, Drugs, Main Problems and Implications, and if you have time add information about your possible anaesthetic technique.

Use this when going through any practice long case viva, so that you get used to the layout, and it becomes a bit like the Mersey technique for SAQs, where you do it the same way often enough you don’t get frightened of it.

When Tash showed me this I remarked that it seemed to be remarkably similar to the front side of the anaesthetic charts where I work…

For an example (obviously created in Paint):

Why do this? Well, it keeps everything neat and organised, and means you can easily refer back to your information “at a glance”.

An invaluable resource came to light in my filing cabinet last night, of a collection of previous viva details from previous candidates of both the Primary and the Final FRCA, and even some FFA Part II and Part III vivas. I was trying to read through them, as they include questions and the answers given by candidates, and they give some valuable insight

If anyone is interested in them, drop me a line.

Also, I have decided that I am bored of re-reading Simon Bricker’s FRCA Viva books and nothing going in, so I have adopted a new approach (at least temporarily) of reading through Prof Hutton’s Book: Anaesthesia. They neatly divide assessment of a patient up into chapters such as “The Patient with an abnormal ECG”, “The patient with poor pulmonary function” and “The patient with an acute abdomen”. I orignally bought it for the Primary, but didn’t read these bits very carefully, so maybe now is the time to get my money’s worth from it?

3 weeks to go…..