How to Revise whilst doing CARER 📝

The dreaded word – exams. You’re in a new town, surrounded by new people, you’re trying to settle in, but you know PT is looming. I have created some top tips for getting the most out of your placement and maximising your revision.

Sometimes you can come back from a day at placement and feel like you haven’t learnt as much as you wanted to. On days like these the best thing to do is to sit down and list the conditions you saw on that day, or whether you learnt a new technique for taking bloods. I find keeping a placement diary really useful.

Once you have written down your list of conditions take an hour to read about them – this can be Youtube videos, the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine, Passmed, Zero to Finals or even chatting with your housemates!

If you feel up to it, you can solidify this knowledge by doing a few questions on those topics from a question bank you like but don’t push yourself too hard – remember you’ve had a long day at placement and rest is also productive.

The above is what I recommend Monday-Wednesday as these are the days you are on placement.

On Thursday you will have lectures timetabled in to do – try to do these during the times they are on the timetable (and lock your phone away in another room). I personally find doing lectures at home quite tricky, so I sometimes pop to the library where there are less distractions. The other half of your day will either be clinical skills or tutorials. During clinical skills get as hands on as you can and practice! With tutorials there is only a small group of you so take advantage of this and ask questions.

Friday is SSC day – SSCs can be time consuming but try to timetable your day and include breaks.

I recommend having a relaxing Friday night, try to avoid doing work and maybe go to a sports club or for a walk.

Due to the nature of CARER, you see lots of different topics all in one go, whereas in Cardiff they do blocks. So do not worry if you do not get a concept first time you will revisit it. Also, you do not need to be an expert on everything for the PT (it’s impossible to learn everything about everything in one term). Try to focus on a few general topics that you know will come up such as acute medicine, respiratory conditions like asthma/COPD etc.

I hope this helps! The main thing to remember is that you will see conditions over and over again so you will naturally learn so much over the year.