Start with the exam you are actually sitting
MRCEM and FRCEM are stages in an emergency medicine pathway, not a single exam with one fixed format. Depending on stage, assessment can combine written papers and structured clinical or viva-style stations. The detail matters: before you schedule revision, check the current examination information, syllabus and candidate guidance on the official Royal College of Emergency Medicine website. Confirm the assessments for your stage, their current format and any published guidance about timing or permitted materials. Do not base your plan on an old course handout or another candidate’s timetable.
This six-week plan is a working template for a UK emergency medicine trainee. It assumes around five to six focused hours each week, divided into manageable sessions. That is a starting point, not a guarantee that six weeks is enough: add time if your diagnostic work shows broad gaps, or if you have more time before the assessment. If your exam is closer, keep the same order but shorten each week and protect practice under timed conditions.
Use your own notes, local teaching material and current guidance to build revision boards. For clinical decisions, follow current UK guidance and your department’s protocols; check exact drug doses and local pathways rather than relying on memory from a question bank.
Set up your week
A useful weekly rhythm is four sessions:
- Session 1 — 60 minutes: retrieve key knowledge from memory, then check it against your notes.
- Session 2 — 75 minutes: answer stage-appropriate questions or write a timed short answer. Review every error.
- Session 3 — 60 minutes: practise a clinical or viva-style case aloud, with a timer and a clear structure.
- Session 4 — 75 minutes: revisit due flashcards, repair weak areas and finish with a short mixed review.
That is four and a half hours. Add a 30–60 minute session for a second case, a mock section or catch-up if your rota allows. If you work shifts, move the sessions across the week rather than trying to revise every day. Keep one short record of what you got wrong and why: knowledge gap, missed red flag, poor prioritisation, unclear explanation or time management. That record should decide what you study next.
A board for this plan might organise an acute topic into recognition, immediate actions, investigations, treatment and disposition. The MySummaries board below shows one example using acute asthma; adapt the sections to your own notes and the cases you need to practise.
A board on this topic ends up looking like this:
- Acute severe features — any of PEF 33–50% predicted or best, respiratory rate ≥25/min, heart rate ≥110/min, or inability to complete sentences
- Life-threatening features — PEF <33%, SpO₂ <92%, silent chest, cyanosis, hypotension, exhaustion or altered consciousness
Life-threatening asthma or failure to improve needs urgent senior review and consideration of critical care involvement. Reassess rather than relying on a single initial measurement.
- Call for senior help if life-threatening features, deterioration or poor response
- Give controlled oxygen if hypoxaemic; monitor observations and response
- Use inhaled/nebulised bronchodilator and early systemic corticosteroid according to current local guidance
- Do not discharge until clinically stable and a safe plan is agreed
- Check inhaler technique, adherence, trigger factors and access to reliever and preventer treatment
- Document treatment, response, follow-up and clear return advice
- Record PEF where feasible without delaying treatment
- Repeat clinical assessment and PEF after initial treatment
- Blood gases are indicated when life-threatening features or poor response make them appropriate; do not delay resuscitation
Week 1: diagnose your gaps and build the plan
Session 1 (60 minutes): check the official guidance for your stage and list the assessment components you need to prepare for. Do a short, untutored sample of each relevant task: questions, written responses, or a spoken case. Use this as a baseline, not as a prediction of your result.
Session 2 (75 minutes): review your errors and group them by theme. Start with acute assessment and ABCDE, because safe prioritisation underpins many emergency cases. For each error, write one action you should have taken earlier.
Session 3 (60 minutes): practise one acute case aloud. Use headings such as immediate actions and safety, focused history, examination, investigations, management, and disposition. State what happens first and why; do not narrate every possible diagnosis before acting on an immediate threat.
Session 4 (75 minutes): collect your own reliable notes for two priority topics and make a board for each. Keep each section short enough to test. The aim this week is a usable map of your gaps, not a large set of polished notes.
The MySummaries due queue can make the recurring review visible across topic boards. In this sample, the numbers are cards waiting in this candidate’s study queue, not exam question counts.
A due queue on this topic ends up looking like this:
Week 2: make first actions automatic
Session 1 (60 minutes): revise ABCDE and immediate stabilisation from your own notes. For each problem, practise saying what you would do while assessing, what needs urgent help and what must not wait for a complete history.
Session 2 (75 minutes): complete a timed set of questions that fits your exam stage. Review explanations and confirm disputed clinical details against current guidance. For each distractor, note whether it was unsafe, premature, unnecessary or simply less urgent.
Session 3 (60 minutes): run two short acute scenarios aloud. Include time-critical differentials and explicit red flags. Ask a colleague to interrupt with a change in observations if possible; otherwise, pause at set points and state what would make you escalate.
Session 4 (75 minutes): revisit Week 1’s cards, then make cards only for facts that need precise recall: thresholds, contraindications, escalation triggers and distinctions between similar presentations. A card should test one thing, not an entire management pathway.
Week 3: practise targeted investigations and interpretation
Session 1 (60 minutes): choose two common presentations from your syllabus and make a focused investigation plan for each. For every test, say what question it answers and what you would do with an abnormal result. Practise avoiding indiscriminate testing.
Session 2 (75 minutes): do a timed written or question practice relevant to your stage. Mark it against the prompt and your notes. Check whether you answered the task asked, prioritised the important findings and made the next step explicit.
Session 3 (60 minutes): rehearse a case that requires you to interpret results and revise your working diagnosis. State dangerous alternatives, what finding would change your plan and when you would seek senior input.
Session 4 (75 minutes): review your error log and choose the most troublesome board section for another focused session. The MySummaries lecture picker below uses a candidate’s card and practice results to suggest a short topic; use an equivalent method with your own log if needed.
A lecture picker on this topic ends up looking like this:
Asthma severity and escalation · Struggling — getting 4 of 9 cards wrong and missing escalation triggers in recent practice
Week 4: management, prescribing and disposition
Session 1 (60 minutes): revise management plans for your priority presentations. Include treatment, contraindications to check, monitoring, reassessment and escalation. Verify doses using current trusted references and local guidance; do not turn an unverified dose into a flashcard.
Session 2 (75 minutes): practise questions or short answers that test management choices. For each case, finish the plan: admit, discharge, observe or refer, with a reason. Add what follow-up and safety-netting are required.
Session 3 (60 minutes): practise a case involving a decision under uncertainty. Explain what you know, what remains uncertain, the risks of each option and how you will reduce those risks. Include capacity and consent when relevant.
Session 4 (75 minutes): do a mixed review of earlier boards, then update cards from repeated errors. If you keep losing the same mark, rewrite the card as a direct question with a specific answer, rather than adding another paragraph to your notes.
Week 5: work under exam conditions
Session 1 (75 minutes): complete a timed practice section in the format relevant to your stage, using the current official guidance to set conditions. Review it straight away and log missed marks by cause.
Session 2 (60 minutes): practise two structured clinical or viva-style stations. Use clear signposting and keep your answer ordered by clinical risk. If you are practising with a colleague, ask them to note whether your first actions, escalation and final disposition were easy to identify.
Session 3 (60 minutes): revisit your two weakest areas from the timed work. Relearn only what is missing, then test it immediately with questions or a short spoken case.
Session 4 (75 minutes): complete a second timed practice task. Compare it with Week 1: look for fewer unsafe omissions, better prioritisation and clearer decisions, not just a higher raw score.
When reviewing oral practice, separate clinical content from delivery. The platform’s oral persona uses its own criteria—prioritisation and immediate safety, clinical reasoning, investigations, management and disposition, communication, and answer structure. These are MySummaries marking criteria, not the official examination scheme. A weak-area view is useful when it ranks repeated practice problems rather than encouraging you to revise everything equally.
A weak-area report on this topic ends up looking like this:
Week 6: consolidate and taper
Session 1 (60 minutes): review your error log and due cards. Focus on recurring, high-risk gaps: what you must do first, what must not be missed, and when to escalate. Check all dose-sensitive facts against a current source.
Session 2 (75 minutes): do one final timed practice task matching your stage. Use the current official exam information to choose appropriate conditions. Mark it carefully, but do not start several new resources or attempt to relearn the whole syllabus.
Session 3 (45–60 minutes): practise one oral case and one communication scenario if these apply to your assessment. For communication or ethics, make the stakeholders, consent or capacity issue, options, escalation and documentation explicit.
Session 4 (30–45 minutes): light recall only. Review concise boards and key cards, organise practical arrangements using official information, and stop if fatigue is making recall worse. Adjust this taper if your assessment schedule or stage requires a different final-week workload.
How MySummaries helps
MySummaries lets you build revision boards from your own PDFs, slides and photographed notes, then create spaced-repetition cards and short audio lectures from those boards. For this plan, use the boards to organise acute topics, review due cards between shifts and use practice results to choose the next weak area. It can also generate written practice and recorded oral cases marked against your material, so you can rehearse prioritisation, decisions and clear explanations. See MySummaries.