Revision Courses

By Zaheer:

Q: Should I go on MPS/MDU revision courses? Will I fail if I don't go on them?

A: I went on the MDU surgery and medicine weekends, whilst Paul attended no courses, and we both ended up passing so I don't think its absolutely necessary to attend these courses. I have no idea about MPS, hammersmith revision course or royal society of medicine courses, gonna have to ask other house officers if they went to them, but there are dozens out there.

Are they value for money, definitely not (£95 each when we did finals!) The MDU medicine lecture was systems based, each would start off with a person being asked to come down and demonstrate examination of that system, followed by a series of photographs of clinical signs, investigations etc. None of the slides had any text and you ended up having to write a lot of notes because the handouts was basically just a photocopy of the lecturers OSCE book (which wasn't particularly good). But despite all that it was inspirational and motivational and kind of charged me up to get on with my revision. It really gave me an idea where I was with my revision compared to everyone else

The surgery weekend was just a review of all of surgery including orthopaedics in one weekend, very intensive and did cover all of surgery, the accompanying notes were much better and more useful, it covered pretty much everything you could possibly need to know.. basically the same as sitting with surgical talk and reading it back to front in one weekend without putting in as much effort

If you have a weekend to spare and don't have to resort to eating tinned food for a month because you've bankrupted yourselves paying for the courses, then I wouldn't discourage you from going, but you are just as likely to pass through your own revision and getting as much teaching as you can during your placements. Most people pass fine without them but some people just don't get peace of mind without trying everything that is available.