Ask most GP trainees which SCA cases they dread and the answer is rarely a clinical one. It is not a rare diagnosis or a complicated drug interaction that keeps people awake before their exam. It is the angry patient, the one who refuses everything you suggest, the one who will not open up, or the one who does not seem to care at all. These cases are not difficult because of the medicine. They are difficult because of the person in front of you, and if you do not deal with that person first, the rest of the consultation rarely goes well, no matter how clinically sound your management plan is. This blog looks at seven of the patient types that come up repeatedly in the SCA, and the specific, learnable techniques that make each one manageable. – Join SCA WhatsApp Teaching Group here – Get SCA Updates and Teaching Emails here – Register for next Free SCA Webinar here – Pass with SCA Ultimate Package here
If you’re practicing for the MRCGP SCA, you have probably already had the experience of looking up at the clock with two minutes left and a management plan you have barely started. It is one of the most common frustrations GP trainees describe, and the usual advice, talk faster, cut the small talk, rush the examination findings, tends to make things worse rather than better. Speed is not the problem. The problem is almost always what you are spending your twelve minutes on. This blog explains how to think about SCA time management properly, using the structure we teach trainees who go on to pass with real time to spare. – Join SCA WhatsApp Teaching Group here – Get SCA Updates and Teaching Emails here – Register for next Free SCA Webinar here – Pass with SCA Ultimate Package here
Ask a group of GP trainees what they know about the ARCP and you tend to get one of three answers. Some have only half heard of it. Some know it is important but assume it is still a long way off. And some have heard just enough, usually from someone else's bad experience, to feel quietly anxious about it without knowing why. All three groups tend to end up in the same place: doing most of their ARCP preparation in the final fortnight, when it should really have been happening all year. This guide sets out what the ARCP actually is, who reviews it, what they are looking at, what each outcome means, and why the most common poor outcome is also the most avoidable. If you understand the process early, in ST1 rather than the week before your first panel, it stops being something to worry about and becomes something you simply keep on top of. – Join National AKT WhatsApp teaching group here – Join National SCA WhatsApp teaching group here – For GP trainee update and teaching emails click here – For MRCGP AKT Preparation click here – For MRCGP SCA Preparation click here
If you dread the statistics questions in the MRCGP AKT more than any other part of the exam, you are not imagining it. Evidence based practice, the section covering statistics, data interpretation and research methods, is consistently the lowest scoring domain in the exam. RCGP's own feedback reports confirm it sitting after sitting. Candidates typically score in the low seventies here, several points behind clinical knowledge, and it is flagged for improvement more often than almost any other area of the curriculum. That is useful information, not a reason to panic. It tells us this is a predictable, solvable weak point. Having taught AKT preparation (akt home) for over fifteen years, I have seen the same small set of reasons come up again and again when trainees lose marks here. None of them are about intelligence or capability. They are about how stats gets approached in the run up to the exam, and every one of them is fixable once you see the pattern. – Join National AKT WhatsApp Teaching Group here – Get AKT Updates and Teaching Emails here – Register for next Free AKT Webinar here – Pass with AKT Ultimate Package here
