The Bottom Line
- The PSA is eight item styles — train each as a separate micro-skill.
- Speed is the hidden constraint: practise under 120-minute conditions.
- BNF navigation is a performance skill; drill it explicitly.
Official PSA structure (anchor your prep here)
The PSA blueprint describes eight item styles and a total of 200 marks completed within 2 hours. Your revision should map 1:1 to those eight item styles, not to random topic reading.
Most candidates ‘revise prescribing’ and hope it transfers. The PSA is more mechanical than that: it’s a set of recurring task types. If you can execute each task type fast and safely, your score rises even if your general pharmacology isn’t perfect.
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Step 1 — Make an 8-lane skills dashboard
Create a tracker with the 8 item styles as columns. After each practice set, log your accuracy and your failure mode (wrong drug, wrong dose, contraindication missed, monitoring forgotten, etc.). Your next session targets the weakest lane.
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Step 2 — Run a BNF ‘speed loop’ (10 minutes/day for 10 days)
Pick 10 common drugs daily. For each: locate dosing, contraindications, interactions, renal/hepatic cautions, pregnancy/breastfeeding, monitoring. Time yourself. The goal is *navigation fluency*, not memorising the BNF.
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Step 3 — Build a ‘never events’ list
Identify the catastrophic errors you keep flirting with (e.g., penicillin allergy, methotrexate weekly dosing, anticoagulant interactions). Convert each into a flashcard + a self-check rule you apply in every prescribing station.
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Step 4 — Practise calculations like an OSCE skill
Don’t ‘revise’ maths. Drill calculation item styles: mg/kg dosing, infusion rates, unit conversions. Write out your working cleanly and standardise your approach to reduce silly errors.
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Step 5 — Simulate the full 120 minutes at least twice
The PSA punishes slow perfectionism. Full mocks teach pacing, triage, and how to recover after a mistake without spiralling.
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Practice
Test your knowledge
Apply this concept immediately with a high-yield question block from the iatroX Q-Bank.
SourcePSA — Official Blueprint (structure, marks, item styles)
Open Link SourcePSA — Official site (overview and candidate resources)
Open Link