Cases for PACES, 3rd Edition

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The MRCP PACES exam consists of a ‘carousel’ containing five clinical stations. Each station is 20 minutes long and there is a 5 minute interval between stations. Two independent examiners oversee each PACES station where there is a patient with a given condition, or a surrogate patient. You’ll need to familiarise yourself with this kind of thing before exam day. That’s ultimately why MRCP PACES courses might have a role to play in your exam preparation – they provide you with access to the same sort of patients that you might not see on the wards.

What you could get is bronchiectasis as a complication of a previous severe pneumonia. Even though that is less common in day to day hospital medicine, it is more likely to come up in an exam. We’ve listed the ten most common cases for all of respiratory, abdominal, neurology and cardiology. Watch this sample case video which follows the new PACES 2023 exam format, due to be introduced in 2023/3. I’m sure that if you’ve got as far as entering PACES you’ll have seen patients with pneumonia come into hospital.

Station three: cardiology cases

Excellent teaching materials, very useful to clear MRCP. Videos of clinical patients are very good and helpful for clearing PACES. Common questions for MRCP PACES candidates are “does anyone have any experience of XX hospital?” and “what is likely to come up in my MRCP PACES exam?” If you are not a UK native, then you should watch some videos online to familiarise yourself with the regional accents. A lot of non-UK born candidates struggle with the regional accents that are within the UK. We have found over 3,000 different accounts of MRCP PACES exams, and what cases came up for various candidates.

After the announcement that MRCP(UK) were re-configuring the format of the MRCP 2 PACES exam, we started to film brand new Patient Cases. Facebook is full of such questions – you really don’t need to look far on the discussion groups there to find examples of this. We committed to ensuring that our PACES resource was fully aligned with the new Stations and timings, and it is now available for candidates taking the exam from 2023/3 onwards.

Station one: respiratory cases

Finally, it is important to realise that spending your time trying to find out about people’s experiences of a specific centre is not going to improve your chances of passing the MRCP PACES. Prepare for the PACES exam with over 340 hi-res, ‘gold standard’ PACES examination videos showing best-practice from model exam candidates In fact, there’s a good chance none of these things will present on your wards at all between you applying for MRCP PACES and turning up for your exam.

It’s super-common for candidates to find out their exam location and date, and immediately try to figure out what cases have come up at that hospital previously. Fluids, antibiotics, potentially inotropes – you know the drill. It’s the sort of thing all medical doctors will definitely encounter repeatedly before they even get close to taking their MRCP PACES. The following set of informative videos outlines the new 10-minute communication encounters and 20-minute clinical consultations within PACES23. Hear from Dr Stuart Hood, Associate Medical Director for Clinical Examinations, as well as observe several roleplayed scenarios. IntroductionEach hospital in the UK has a dedicated postgraduate education unit and the MRCP PACES exam at that centre will be organised locally through this department. As such they will be able to inform you whether they can provide you with accommodation and how much it would cost or otherwise give you local advice about hotels that are nearby and travelling options. There is very significant selection bias inherent in the cases that show up on exam day. If you have insight into this selection bias you can use it to more effectively target your revision. If you’ve worked in hospital medicine, you’ll have very likely seen alcoholics, intravenous drug users, and other people with a history of substance abuse.