Pass the PSA E-Book

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Don’t make it too complicated. Remember, this exam is aimed at final year medical students and Foundation Year 1 doctors so the paper will not ask you to prescribe chemotherapy drugs or other specialist medications so don’t worry about learning those. You will be asked to determine: the most common or most serious side-effect of a drug, which drug is most likely responsible for an ADR, potential drug interactions, and management of an ADR. The drug of choice that should come to mind is ‘Furosemide” and hence should be searched up on the BNF to get information such as the route, dose and frequency Each question has 10 marks available (5 for the drug choice and 5 for the choice of dose/route/frequency). You will be provided with a clinical scenario and some investigation results and tasked with determining the most appropriate course of action forward with regard to prescribing. (e.g withdrawing a medication, reducing its dose, no change, increasing its dose or switching to a new medication).

The PSA is a very time-sensitive assessment and therefore time management is important. A guide of how long you should spend on each section (based on weightage) is as detailed below: Application of Temporary Pass is available online. Please visit the link here to access the iPass Portal. The prescribing items are marked using an automated system that compares the given answer with a mark scheme containing a number of correct answer(s) and suboptimal answers. The given answer must exactly match one of the answers in the mark scheme in all respects for credit to be given automatically.There is an element of judgement of which is most important, if several pieces of information are accurate. Typically, the prescription review section involves reviewing 6-10 medications and identifying which medications should be stopped or could be a cause of a clinical problem such as impaired renal function.

Questions will cover Medicine, Surgery, General Practice, Psychiatry, Paediatrics, Obstetrics & Gynaecology, and Geriatrics. There will be 2 fluid prescribing questions – learn how much fluid a patient is likely to need for resuscitation, rehydration and maintenance, and which fluids to use.For example: ‘What would you prescribed to treat acute pulmonary oedema secondary to left ventricular systolic dysfunction?’

As well as a detailed explanation for each PSA question, our question bank platform will display a relevant topic snippet (if available). For example, if a question asks about asthma management, a topic snippet covering asthma management will be displayed. Advanced analytics There are 36 seconds per mark; if you are struggling to find an answer within a suitable time frame for the available marks, make a best guess (there is no negative marking) and move on. Often relevant adverse drug reactions (ADRs) can be found in either the “side effect”, “interactions” or “cautions” section of the medication. Sp aced repetition is a technique for improving the retention of information . It works by spacing out the intervals between review sessions . This spacing allows you to consolidate the information making it more likely you will recall it during the prescribing safety assessment.Enzyme inhibitors: AO DEVICES – allopurinol, omeprazole, disulfiram, erythromycin, valproate, isoniazid, ciprofloxacin, ethanol (acute intoxication), sulphonamides. Others: grapefruit juice, amiodarone, and SSRIs (fluoxetine, sertraline). Read carefully whether you are being asked to assess that the treatment is working/ beneficial or whether you are assessing for adverse effects – you will do different tests for each of these. Don’t lose easy marks! As prescribing counts for a whopping great 40% of the marks don’t lose out on the ample marks available for your signature and the date! The BNF can be used at any point during the PSA examination. Therefore, it is absolutely vital that candidates are confident with using the BNF prior to the exam.

Take into consideration specific information you are given about a patient when deciding which piece of information is best – e.g. are they of childbearing age? In the real assessment, the post-assessment review process considers every unrecognised answer and all credit-worthy answers are added to the mark scheme to enable marks to be credited.

PSA Question Item Styles: Planning Management, Providing Information, Adverse Drug, Reactions, Drug Monitoring and Data Interpretation - Dr Lynne Bollington