How to Study General Practice: A Practical Guide

Start with the exam you are actually taking

There is no single international general practice exam. Assessment varies by country, training programme and professional body. Before planning revision, check the official exam or training-body website for the current curriculum, assessment components, permitted resources and marking guidance. Do not assume that another country’s written paper, OSCE or consultation format applies to yours.

Make a one-page map from that information. List the assessed domains, the types of task you will meet and any published criteria. Typical general practice learning spans undifferentiated presentations, prevention, long-term conditions, mental health, communication, prescribing, safeguarding and continuity of care. Use your own curriculum to decide what is examinable and how much time to give each area.

For each domain, record three things: what you need to know, what you need to do in a consultation, and what you need to explain to a patient or examiner. This prevents revision becoming a stack of disease summaries detached from clinical decisions.

Build a board around a real consultation

Study one presentation or condition at a time, but organise it around the work of a GP: identify immediate risk, establish what is going on, agree a safe plan and arrange follow-up. For each topic, use a small set of sections:

• Presentation and initial assessment
• Important alternatives and red flags
• Tests and interpretation
• Management choices, including shared decisions
• Safety-netting and follow-up

Keep the source of each clinical rule visible. Guidance can differ between countries and can change; prioritise the guideline used by your programme or local service. Where two sources disagree, record which applies to your exam rather than blending the recommendations.

For example, diabetes is useful to revise as a continuing-care problem rather than just a diagnostic threshold. A candidate may need to interpret a result, check whether it needs confirmation, look for complications, discuss a management plan and set a review. A board on this topic ends up looking like this:

The value of the board is not that every patient needs every action at every visit. It is that the steps are visible, so you can practise selecting the relevant ones for a particular case.

Reduce each topic to must-not-miss decisions

Once you have a topic board, make a short core checklist. It should contain the facts that change a decision: a threshold, a contraindication, a red flag, a time-critical action or a follow-up requirement. Avoid turning the core into a miniature textbook. If a detail does not affect an answer or a safe plan, leave it in the wider notes.

For diabetes, the diagnostic values are worth knowing, but the candidate also needs to recognise when a result may not be dependable and when the patient’s immediate condition matters more than routine chronic-disease review. Check these facts against the guideline used by your course or exam.

A compact checklist for the board might look like this:

Practise retrieval, not just recognition

Read a section once, then close the source and answer a focused question aloud or in writing. For example: “What would make this HbA1c result unreliable?” or “What do I need to establish before calling this a routine follow-up?” Compare your answer with your board and correct the missing point. This effortful retrieval is more useful than repeatedly highlighting a familiar paragraph.

Turn single, testable facts into flashcards. Keep the question narrow enough that you can answer it without reciting an entire consultation. Review difficult cards again sooner and easy cards less often, following whatever spaced-repetition system you use. Do not use a card to replace clinical reasoning: a threshold card can test recall, while a case question tests whether you know when and how to apply it.

A short diabetes deck from this board could include:

That is a MySummaries deck, filled with general practice material. Yours is written from your own notes. Start free

For each card, read the question, commit to an answer, then reveal the back. Choose the grade that reflects how well you recalled the fact, not how familiar the wording looked. If you missed the qualification about local confirmation rules, grade it as a miss and revisit the relevant board section.

Practise the consultation in steps

General practice questions often test prioritisation as much as factual recall. Use a repeatable sequence when working through a case:

1. Clarify the problem: establish the patient’s concern, symptoms, relevant history and context.
2. Check for urgency: identify features that need immediate action or a different level of care.
3. Explain your reasoning: state the leading possibility and important alternatives, including what would change your view.
4. Plan with the patient: choose suitable investigations or treatment, explain options and check understanding.
5. Close the loop: safety-net, arrange follow-up and make clear who will act on outstanding results.

Practise adapting the sequence, not delivering it as a script. In an oral or written case, a candidate who recites routine review tasks without first responding to the patient’s symptoms may miss the central decision. In a written answer, put the immediate risk and next action near the beginning. In a consultation station, use plain language and check the patient’s agenda before moving through your checklist.

Use cases to find gaps

After building a board, answer case-based questions that require you to choose an action. For every wrong or incomplete answer, identify the cause: missing knowledge, overlooking a red flag, applying a threshold without its qualification, or failing to explain follow-up. Repair the specific gap on the board and make a card only if it is a concise fact worth retrieving later.

A useful progression is to begin with straightforward presentations, then add uncertainty: a borderline result, a patient with several conditions, a medicine that affects test interpretation, or a patient whose priorities differ from the standard plan. For each case, say what you know, what remains uncertain and what you will do next. Avoid inventing certainty where the information does not support it.

Listen back to a difficult topic

Use audio as a way to revisit a connected clinical sequence, not as a substitute for active practice. Choose a topic you already have notes on, listen for the decision points, then pause and recall the next step before continuing. If you cannot explain why a result needs confirmation or what makes the situation urgent, return to the relevant source and update your board.

A short lecture on the diabetes board could sound like this:

Keep the plan tied to your curriculum

Return to your one-page exam map regularly. If a curriculum area has not appeared in your boards or practice, create a board for it. If you keep missing the same kind of decision, spend the next session practising that decision rather than rereading your strongest topics. Use official guidance for local thresholds, drug choices, referral routes and assessment requirements; these are not interchangeable across countries.

A workable study cycle is: map the curriculum, build a board from trusted notes, reduce it to a short core, retrieve facts with cards, apply them in cases, then correct the gaps. Repeat the cycle across the domains your exam actually assesses. This gives you a method for both broad coverage and deeper work on uncertain clinical decisions.

How MySummaries helps

MySummaries turns your own notes, PDFs, slides or photographed pages into revision boards. From a board such as the diabetes example, it can create spaced-repetition flashcards and an examiner-voice audio lecture, alongside written and oral practice marked against your material. Check clinical thresholds and treatment choices against the official guidance relevant to your country and exam. Open MySummaries.