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.

The PSA was developed by the Medical Schools Council (MSC) and British Pharmacology Society (BPS) with roll-out across medical schools in the UK during 2014. You don’t need to know everything, you just need to know how to find it. This is key! There are things you need to know – but you can be smart about learning what can’t be found on the BNF as long as you know how to locate the information you are looking for. For example what to do with a high INR can be found in the BNF. 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. If you are unsure about the medication used to treat a condition such as an acute dystonic reaction. The best solution is to search “poisoning” under treatment summaries which would tell you that procyclidine or diazepam can be used in this scenario. The treatment summaries can help in this section if you are not sure what drug should be used. However, having a good basic understanding of most conditions allows you to focus on looking up the appropriate drug based on your prior understanding which helps save time.Know which drugs are prescribed in MICROgrams (e.g. levothyroxine, digoxin) – these are often prescribed in MILLIgrams to catch you out. 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!

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? Our advanced question bank platform allows you to filter PSA questions based on specialty and PSA question format. Search up the medications “monitoring requirements”, “important safety information” or “pre-treatment screening” on the BNF. Know how to prescribe gentamicin and how to use the gentamicin chart to determine next prescription timing Each question has 10 marks available (5 for the drug choice and 5 for the choice of dose/route/frequency).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.

For example, patients require ~ 1mmol/kg/day of K+, this should not be infused at a rate >10mmol/hr. The PSA Pass Centre is open between 8.00am and 5.00pm from Monday to Friday only and is closed on Public Holidays. The last queue number will be issued at 4.30pm for any application and collection.

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Get familiar with the BNF (both online and paper versions) and know where to find things as it isn’t always obvious or easy. For example, converting opioid doses is in the palliative care summary, HRT is in the sex hormones summary, and high INR management is in the oral anticoagulants summary. If unsure of how to manage ADR, the answers can often be found in the respective treatment summaries of the BNF. For examples – medication overdoses (poisoning, emergency treatment), hypoglycaemia (hypoglycaemia), reversal of a high INR (oral anticoagulants). 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. The maximum dose of paracetamol is 1g QDS – common dosing errors will include 1g 4hrly or co-prescription of paracetamol and co-codamol.