Rachel Moore's Final FRCA guide

Part 1: Written SAQ/MCQ My revision I started about six months before the written. I read lots of CEACCP articles. People have all sorts of different theories about how many years backwards you should read and I’m not sure this is helpful. You might get one or two questions from the last six months, but this certainly didn’t seem to be as clear-cut as other people had led me to believe. As dull as it is, make some attempt to map them to the curriculum and you should cover quite a lot of the material. Also, you need to be familiar with AAGBI guidelines and new (relevant) NICE guidelines etc. For example, we had a question on the NICE NOF guidelines. Someone (who may or may not have been an examiner…) told me about six weeks before the exam to write one SAQ properly every day between then and the exam. You would cover over 40 questions and should get your technique sorted. In addition I tried to draft answers for at least another two questions each day, no matter whether I was on call or on nights or whatever. In total, it’s probably only 30 minutes writing a day but it stopped me from feeling like I wasn’t doing anything. Similarly, the same person told me to ensure you had answers prepared for all of the questions to the last four papers. There will be at least one or two direct repeats. For the MCQ, I just did practice questions in addition to the other reading. I also went back and did a lot of Primary MCQs. Don’t underestimate the amount of Primary knowledge in both components. Again, there are lots of questions of the eLearning for Health website and you should do the ones in the college book. The SBAs were by far the hardest to prepare for. There are only a limited number of examples available from the college, although these do come up in the exam, so you should know the answers to these! (I think three came up in our exam, and given there are only thirty SBAs…) The Mendonca book (Single Best Answer MCQs in Anaesthesia) is too simplistic and the answers are invariably obvious. Do not buy Nickels, Everett, Walton SBAs for the Final FRCA. It’s awful, nothing like the exam and completely demoralising. I think they may have written a new one now that probably doesn’t include the question about the content of salt in Branflakes… Books Shorthouse: SAQs for the Final FRCA (Oxford Specialty Training, Revision Texts). This book contains lots of questions, broken down into topics mapped to the curriculum. Feasible, bullet-point answers, good diagrams and really easy to read. Bricker: Short Answer Questions in Anaesthesia. Although the question format is outdated, the material covered is still very relevant and it saved me going back and looking at a lot of Primary material separately. Bahal, Khan, Manoras: Get Through the Final FRCA MCQs. It was okay, nothing special. Courses Coventry: It was three days of self-congratulatory (on behalf of the faculty) purgatory but it made me sit down and write an SAQ paper to time, which was definitely useful and they also run a SAQ club leading up to the course where you submit questions and they’re marked and returned to you on the course. A lot of their speakers (despite my earlier whinging) were very well prepared and had been back through all of the questions on their topic for the last ten years. If you go, take lots of sweets: it’s the only way to survive.

Part 2: Viva My revision More practice. The same rules apply as for the Primary. Make sure you’ve read the questions in the college books. I had at least one question word- for-word from one of the books and it takes the stress out of the whole thing when you’ve seen the answer crib sheet previously. We again spent quite a lot of time quizzing each other (at 7:15am this time, before seeing the pre-ops). It helps with structuring questions, especially if you haven’t got a clue how to start. I also made a point of carrying around viva books and giving them to the consultants and asking them to quiz me during tedious ENT cases that went on a lifetime. I think for some of the bosses this helped: they didn’t feel like they had to think up something on the spur of the moment but I still had to endure the element of surprise or not having a clue what they would select. I used and abused consultants I knew had a special interest in certain topics. I hadn’t done my pain module before the viva so I sat down with one of the pain specialists who gave me a crash course in a day and made me feel I could at least start to answer a question on chronic pain. Books Tandon: Structured Oral Examination Practice for the Final FRCA (Oxford Specialty Training). It’s got some interesting topics not covered elsewhere. Barker: Mills et al The Clinical Anaesthesia Viva Book. This and the Anaesthesia Science Viva Book cover almost everything you can think of (and lots of things you can’t, like immunology…). Bricker: The Anaesthesia Science Viva Book Mendonca, Hillermann et al: Structured Oral Examination in Clinical Anaesthesia: Practice Examination Papers. Another good book that covers a lot of material. Written as the exam with one long case, three short cases and then the basic sciences viva. Courses I didn’t do any courses before the viva but that’s because I felt like I’d be quizzed to within an inch of my life at work. QE organise teaching for all the trainees in the school on Friday afternoons and then Monday to Thursday evenings in the fortnight before the viva. This was all really useful and done by a mixture of trainees and consultants.