Start with the assessment you are preparing for
General Practice is a broad subject, and there is no single international exam structure to plan around. Before you schedule study, check the official website of your licensing body, training programme or examination provider. Use its syllabus, candidate guidance and sample material to identify the topics and assessment skills you need. Do not assume that another country’s format or clinical guidance applies to you.
The plan below works as a four-week cycle that you can repeat or extend. It assumes about five hours a week, divided into four sessions of roughly 60–75 minutes. If you have less time, keep the order and shorten each session; if you have more, add practice and review rather than collecting more resources.
For each topic, work from the notes and guidance that apply to your setting. Record the source and date on your study board, especially where screening, prescribing, referral thresholds or local pathways may change. A useful board answers three questions: what must I recognise, what must I do next, and what must I explain to the patient?
Set up a repeatable weekly routine
Use the same four kinds of session each week:
- Recall session, 60 minutes: retrieve key facts without looking, then correct gaps from your notes. Turn facts you repeatedly forget into flashcards.
- Topic session, 75 minutes: build or update one board from your own material. Keep it focused on a presentation, condition or consultation task, not a whole textbook chapter.
- Case session, 60 minutes: work through two or three cases. Practise a concise history, prioritised differential, examination or investigation choices, management and safety-netting.
- Review session, 60–75 minutes: revisit due cards, redo missed questions or cases, and choose what to study next based on errors.
Leave a short break between demanding sessions where possible. A session should end with something you can check: a completed board section, a set of answered cards, a case response or a list of corrected errors. Reading alone is difficult to measure, so pair it with recall or application.
Week 1: Map the syllabus and build your first board
Session 1 — 60 minutes: make the study map. Download or note the current syllabus and official guidance for your assessment. Divide the content into practical groups, such as prevention, acute presentations, long-term conditions, mental health, child health, older people, women’s health, communication and practice organisation. Mark each area as unfamiliar, partly secure or secure. Add local guidelines or course notes as the source for clinical details.
Session 2 — 75 minutes: choose one common presentation. Pick a topic that appears in your syllabus and that you find difficult to organise. Build a board from your own notes. For example, a low-back-pain board can separate urgent warning signs, focused history and examination, decisions about investigation, initial management, and follow-up. Keep the board short enough to scan before a case.
A first board in MySummaries might organise low-back-pain notes into practical sections like these:
- Cauda equina concern — new bladder or bowel dysfunction, saddle sensory change or progressive bilateral neurological symptoms need urgent assessment
- Possible serious cause — consider cancer, infection, fracture or other specific pathology from the history and examination
Do not request imaging routinely for uncomplicated low-back pain. Base investigation or referral on suspected serious pathology, neurological findings and the applicable local pathway.
- Clarify onset, site, radiation, function, previous episodes and relevant medical history
- Ask about trauma, systemic symptoms, cancer history, immunosuppression and neurological symptoms
- Agree a plan that supports activity and self-management when appropriate
- Explain the expected review plan and give clear instructions on symptoms that should prompt urgent help
Assess general state and relevant spinal and neurological findings; tailor the examination to the history and the patient's symptoms.
Session 3 — 60 minutes: work cases aloud or in writing. Use two short cases from your course material. For each, state the key problem, the most important alternatives, what you would assess next, and the immediate plan. Include what you would tell the patient and what change would trigger urgent review. Compare your response with your source notes and add missing points to the board.
Session 4 — 60 minutes: start retrieval. Make a small set of cards from the board, each testing one decision or fact. Answer them before viewing the back, then grade honestly. For missed cards, check the source and rewrite the answer in language you could use in a consultation. Schedule a brief review later in the week.
Week 2: Cover common presentations and practise decisions
Session 1 — 60 minutes: due review. Begin by answering scheduled cards rather than rereading the boards. A due queue helps you see whether reviews are accumulating across topics:
If the queue is large, complete it in manageable blocks and reduce new cards until it is under control. Do not turn every line of a guideline into a card. Prioritise distinctions that affect assessment, immediate safety, choice of next step or advice to the patient.
Session 2 — 75 minutes: build a second board. Choose a common presentation from a different area, such as cough, abdominal pain, headache or low mood. Use the same structure: recognition and red flags; targeted history and examination; investigations or referral; management; follow-up and safety-netting. Check current local guidance for thresholds, medicine choices and referral routes rather than borrowing them from a different health system.
Session 3 — 60 minutes: practise a decision pathway. Work through three cases, varying one important feature each time. For example, consider how your assessment changes when a patient with cough is systemically unwell, has a relevant comorbidity or reports a concerning symptom. Explain why the feature changes your next step. Avoid memorising a single pathway without understanding its limits.
Session 4 — 60 minutes: review errors. Sort errors into knowledge gaps, missed clues, unsafe prioritisation, incomplete explanations and time management. For each error, write one correction and one action: check the source, add a card, revise a board section or practise another case. This turns review into a task rather than a vague intention.
Week 3: Use weak areas to choose what comes next
Session 1 — 60 minutes: retrieve across topics. Mix cards from the first two weeks. Interleaving topics helps you practise identifying which problem you are dealing with, rather than relying on the title of a chapter to guide you. Mark a card wrong if your answer misses a clinically important distinction, even if some wording is familiar.
Session 2 — 75 minutes: target a weak section. Use your results to pick one area for a focused board update. If safety-netting is repeatedly incomplete, practise stating the specific change in symptoms, the level of urgency and where the patient should seek help. If you are unsure about an investigation, check the relevant source and record the indication and limitations.
A topic picker can direct a short teaching session towards the section with the most repeated difficulty:
Red flags · Struggling — getting 4 of 9 cards wrong, scored 41% when last examined
Use a short lecture or explanation to clarify that section, then return to retrieval. Listening is useful for reviewing a topic while travelling or between sessions, but it should not replace answering questions or applying the information to cases.
Session 3 — 60 minutes: do a timed case set. Choose several cases from your materials and give yourself a fixed time for each. The timing is for practice, not a claim about any particular examination. After each response, check whether you addressed the main risk, explained your reasoning, offered an appropriate plan and communicated follow-up clearly. If your actual assessment has a different task or time limit, use the official guidance to set the practice conditions.
Session 4 — 60 minutes: repair and retest. Review the weakest board section, then answer related cards or a fresh case without looking at the answer. If you still miss the same point, simplify the board or make the question more specific. A card should test one answer, not ask you to recite an entire consultation.
Week 4: Consolidate and plan the next cycle
Session 1 — 60 minutes: mixed recall. Review due cards across all topics. Keep difficult cards in rotation and suspend cards that are ambiguous or based on outdated notes until you have checked the source. Record the date or version of guidance when it matters.
Session 2 — 75 minutes: complete one new topic board. Choose a topic that remains uncovered in your map. Use the same board structure and make only the cards that support future recall. This prevents one favourite area from taking up all your study time.
Session 3 — 60 minutes: simulate the relevant task. Use sample materials from your official provider if available. Otherwise, practise a case response in a format relevant to your programme, such as a structured written plan or a spoken consultation explanation. Do not assume that a generic practice format reproduces your exam; confirm the actual requirements with the official body.
Session 4 — 60 minutes: review the month. Compare your original topic map with your current confidence and results. Rank weak areas by risk and frequency in your syllabus, then select the next four-week cycle. A simple review can show whether accuracy is improving in the areas you have revisited:
Do not interpret a percentage as proof that you are ready or unready for a particular examination. It is a way to choose the next study task. Check whether the errors are clinically important, repeated and relevant to the official syllabus.
Keep the plan workable
If you miss a session, resume with the next scheduled task; do not spend the whole week trying to catch up on every missed reading. If your work or placement schedule changes, preserve the weekly review session and shorten new-topic sessions first. Keep one reliable source for each clinical area, and update boards when guidance changes.
At the end of each session, write down the next action in a few words: “check local referral pathway”, “redo cough cases” or “review due cards”. That small handover makes it easier to restart, and it keeps the plan anchored to specific gaps instead of hours spent studying.
How MySummaries helps
MySummaries turns your own PDFs, slides and photographed notes into topic boards, then supports spaced-repetition cards and targeted review from the material you have added. For this plan, use a board to organise one General Practice topic, cards to retrieve its key decisions, and your results to choose the next weak section. Open MySummaries.