NICE Clinical Knowledge Summaries are written to support primary care professionals with concise, accessible summaries of current evidence. That makes CKS a superb scaffold for revision — if you treat it as a prompt generator rather than a document to read end-to-end.
The trap: ‘it feels familiar’
Reading a clean, well-structured guideline can feel productive, but familiarity is not retrieval. The fix is to convert each section into questions you must answer from memory, then use short spaced revisits to stabilise recall.
1
Step 1 — Pick one CKS topic and set a 12-minute timer
You are not ‘studying the whole topic’. You are building a recall artefact. Time-boxing prevents you from sliding into passive reading.
2
Step 2 — Generate prompts from headings (not paragraphs)
Use the structure: “When to suspect?”, “Red flags?”, “Key differentials?”, “First-line approach?”, “Follow-up?” Convert each heading into a question you must answer without looking.
3
Step 3 — Attempt recall first, then check
Answer your prompts from memory. Then open CKS to check only the specific gaps. This sequence (attempt → feedback) is what builds durable memory.
4
Step 4 — Write a one-line rule for each gap
Your rule must be short enough to fit on a single line. If it takes a paragraph, it is not yet usable under exam pressure.
5
Step 5 — Spaced revisits (2, 7, 14 days)
Re-answer the same prompts on Day 2, Day 7, Day 14. Most of the value comes from the second and third retrieval attempts, not the first reading.
SourceNICE: About CKS
Open Link SourceNICE: CKS guide (how topics are developed) (PDF)
Open Link SourceRoediger & Karpicke (2006): Testing effect (PubMed)
Open Link