Misbah had shared with me the information college had given regarding changes to the new exam.

It is reassuring to learn that there will be no change to the history and management, communication and video stations of the exam.

Changes are to the clinical stations and the development station.

There will be three clinical stations instead of four. They will be two short clinical stations and one extended clinical station.

The extended clinical station will have a scenario given followed by time for history and examination. The examination will be virtual hands-free.

It will be very important for the candidate to practice vocalising what they have been doing intuitively and in autopilot since they qualified.

This would be followed as before with summarising, differential diagnosis and management planning.

The development station will be on similar skeleton framework and the candidate would be expected to describe how they would be conducting the developmental assessment.

The rest of summarising the evaluation of differential diagnosis of developmental age and the discussion will be as before.

Any change causes anxiety but if we stand back and look at the new format it is more of old then off new. You will be expected to do differently only for a very short portion of the particular station and this will improve with practice till the actual date.

We agreed to:

  • Read Hutchison’s Clinical methods for systemic examinations.
  • Write out bullet points of one system each
  • Positive and negative signs to identify in a given scenario
  • We will share & practice
  • Wait for RCPCH details on the clinical station
  • Start on our rolling Course systematic template from 1 September.

We practised skills so we could do them in our sleep – NOW we need to learn to talk in our sleep!


add a comment or any point I may have missed.
Anil Garg