PLAB 2 Personal Experience
This group had contributed immensely in my entire PLAB journey and had been my absolute go-to place for any form of academic queries,so I wanted to give back something to the future PLAB pathway-pursuers,in the hope,that the things I learnt in my journey the hard way, I can maybe make it a bit easier for someone else next.
To begin with, I booked my exam the very next day I received my PLAB-1 results & booked for 24 th July.
Moving to a new country and taking on certain responsibilities left me with a liberty of a good 2-2.5 months of focused dedicated preparation,of course without any other job commitments. However, preparation time is very subjective.
Now, there are a few pointers I have summarized which worked for me, and I am sure if anyone understands the nature of this OSCE-style exam,will work for him too.
Let me break down the exam in 2 phases:preparation phase and performance phase.For the preparation phase,I have listed few points which are essential to follow:
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Keeping 1 consistent study-partner and multiple rotating study-partners-
A consistent study partner will be like your accountability-clock,who will push you into finishing chunks of the syllabus in a given time frame and he/she should have the exam dates similar to yours and must be as dedicated as you are.Doesn’t have to be from your medical school or even country.Fixing this is as important as reading the syllabus. So invest in the search.I had some very dedicated partners to whom I am immensely grateful -who were from Egypt, Myanmar, Pakistan and India!
Rotating partners are essential to challenge you,and keep you on a revision-clock.The strategy is to finish one topic with partner-1 and revise the same topic with partner-2 the following day, and re-revise the same topic with partner-3 on last day of week-1. You have mastered the topic now! -
Simulating selflessly and being the doctor interchangeably-
we often feel that a particular topic is very very important or we have a weak point there and therefore ,being the doctor in a practice-session for that topic will help us improvise. Well,no! The Strategy is to hack the examiners’ mind and to be able to deliver what he wants you to say. To be able to do that, we must familarize ourselves with asking questions in a scenerio,what we will be asked on our exam day. So selflessly simulate for your friends and try to help and correct them. Give them feedbacks.If you help someone in his journey,Allah will help you too. -
Time management- I can’t overemphasize this point. We tend to have this obsession of taking perfect long histories,and end up asking the mixture of all illogical and logical questions. When it comes to telling the management in 2 minutes, we tend to rush and not even complete it properly.
Your focus should be to spend 5.5 minutes in data gathering portion,where like a chain,you must ask all relevant questions-open ended first and then closed ended,exclude a minimum of 2-3 d/ds and exclude at least 4 core redflags. In management,you only give the patient choice of treatments which he/she is willing to take and safety-net her and give her some reading information to take home-if necessary. As simple as it is.If your management doesn’t impress the examiner, his marking won’t impress you when you receive the results! -
Reading materials-
Won’t advocate for any academy or specific reading material,but what worked best for me is reading All days pdf thoroughly and incorporating some Mo shobhy management in my iPad, with all days. This too may be subjective! Besides,I would recommend doing dr Lovan’s classes 1 month before exam, irrespective of whether anyone took any academy or not.His dedication and breakdown into the exam is the only one thing you will need! -
NICE CKS + NHS guideline is your bestest friend- whichever materials you read, never forget to login to NICE CKS website at the end of each reading and just pick up the most recent main treatment in the most simplified way.Do see the same management from NHS guidelines later to be able to explain the management in layman’s term to your patient on the exam day. Academy pdfs are often backdated and make us sound very very scripted.
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Key questions in finger tips- each presenting complaint has some key diagnosing questions,this is where you have to actively invest in remembering them.Even if you know the diagnosis and management by heart and you haven’t asked your patient these questions in your data- gathering portion,chances of you sounding scripted to the examiner will be very high.(however ,there just 1/2 cases in PLAB-2,which we diagnose by exclusion, e.g- somatoform disorder in psychiatry)
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Recalls- 2.5 weeks before your exam, the advice will be to stop reading any new material (except if there had been any new case)& start going through recalls of both street and square vigorously. You and your study partner must interchangeably simulate and practice last 2 months’ recalls each day and try the closed book approach of telling each other managements of all related topics to 1 particular recall. For example- in dermatology if Melanoma came in street recalls, you tell each other management of 12-13 dermatological cases in 1 minute so that your dermatology is revised with!
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Mocks- be it academy or mocks with your senior Passed plabber or your friend,don’t refrain from taking it seriously. 2 weeks before exam, mock- feedbacks are really important to give you an insight of where you lack and what are your strengths I gave mocks with different people and the feedbacks were immensely helpful.
Now for the performance:
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Enter and leave the room with confidence and a very positive energy- we tend to rush the introduction part with our examiner, thinking that we are saving time. But if the examiner is the one marking us, I felt that having a good-30 seconds of calming encounter whereby you say your name and GMC number-is a very very essential start to a wonderful performance!This has to be with a smile. Before leaving the room, even if the time is up, thanking the patient and then thanking the examiner politely is also very important.
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Letting the patient talk more than yourself-we often tend to talk more and say all possible things to show the examiner that we know the topic inside-out, which is very wrong. Because all those 50 candidates in your exam centre & on your exam day know the topics too, some maybe be extremely senior to you even in terms of knowledge and experience, you are not expected to deliver a genius-level diagnosis,all you are expected is to prove that if you have to work in NHS the very next day, you are a safe doctor.
My approach was to let the patients talk their hearts out in data-gathering part and to make them comfortable with every management I give later-on by constantly checking if they are ok with it, in the management part . -
SIMMAN- the best advice I received till date was -not to treat the SIMMAN as a dead body, rather to constantly reassure the patient,talking with himand keep focusing on ABCDE, no matter what the diagnosis is. The ABCDE serial should never be overridden.
The key here is that we keep talking to the SIMMAN so loudly that not only do we manage the patient, we indirectly keep telling the examiner what exactly we are doing and save us the time- wastage of answering their questions separately later on.
Unless mentioned in the question, examiner doesn’t exist in the room for you,it’s just you and your simman. -
Prescription and BNF- don’t forget to open the respective BNF ( child or adult) during your prescription station,regardless of whether you remember the medicine dose or not. This might seem staged, but this stage performance is very important here.
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Respecting the patient both in consultation and examination- as simple as it sounds,some non-verbal gestures can improvise your impression to the examiner in ways you never imagined.Respecting your patient is one of them.
Before any examination,ensuring his/ her privacy, warming your hands before touching, sanitising your hands properly,constantly checking on if your examination is making the patient uncomfortable or inflicting any pain, demonstrating every minute step of the examination to the patient as you go by,apologising to your patient for even pronouncing his name wrong or even asking a question twice ( if you did)-are absolute essentials!The simulators on the exam day could honestly contest for Oscar’s for their acting skills even, because their performance and response to your steps are absolutely top-notch!
I have tried to pin down everything which I have gathered in my little journey and I will be only too happy to help anyone if there are further queries .
Snapshot of my PLAB 2 journey:
- I was enrolled in Common Stations Academy (completely useless, waste of money)
- Went to the academy for a total of only 6-7 days
- Did Dr lovaan masterclass (5 days) + read blue notes + made my own notes
- Used Dr alaa + Dr lovaan notes of Plabforum
- Read: all days+ moshobhy + free written notes of dsr academy by dr alaa in PLAB for pediatrics, Opthalmology specially.
