Pass the PSA E-Book

Product Information

The PSA is a two hour prescribing exam taken in the final year of medical school. It is comprised of 8 sections totalling 200 marks over 120 minutes. These sections include: If you are unsure about the medication used to treat a condition such as an acute dystonic reaction. The best solution is to search “poisoning” under treatment summaries which would tell you that procyclidine or diazepam can be used in this scenario. The Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA) is a pass/fail assessment of the skills, judgment and supporting knowledge related to prescribing medicines in the NHS. The PSA assesses the prescribing skills of final-year medical students and is based on the competencies identified by the General Medical Council outlined in Outcomes for graduates (originally published in Tomorrow's Doctors). These competencies include writing new prescriptions, reviewing existing prescriptions, calculating drug doses, identifying and avoiding both adverse drug reactions and medication errors and amending prescribing to suit individual patient circumstances. The content of each item is relevant to the prescribing tasks expected of an F1 doctor, i.e. the questions refer to ailments and drugs that graduates are likely to be dealing with in year one of the Foundation Programme. Know your metrics! milligrams and millilitres, micrograms and nanograms. Know the difference and how to convert between them. There will be 2 fluid prescribing questions – learn how much fluid a patient is likely to need for resuscitation, rehydration and maintenance, and which fluids to use.

Here you will be given a clinical scenario and asked to decide which treatment would be most appropriate from several plausible answers. There is an element of judgement of which is most important, if several pieces of information are accurate. Typically, the prescription review section involves reviewing 6-10 medications and identifying which medications should be stopped or could be a cause of a clinical problem such as impaired renal function. Data interpretation made memorable and simple including ECG, ABGs, chest X-rays and basic bloods. Common traps highlighted throughout.As well as a detailed explanation for each PSA question, our question bank platform will display a relevant topic snippet (if available). For example, if a question asks about asthma management, a topic snippet covering asthma management will be displayed. Advanced analytics When titrating drugs, for example, thyroxine to get TSH in range, you should usually make the smallest increment change possible.

Don’t lose easy marks! As prescribing counts for a whopping great 40% of the marks don’t lose out on the ample marks available for your signature and the date!

Prepare for the PSA with Geeky Medics

You will be asked to determine: the most common or most serious side-effect of a drug, which drug is most likely responsible for an ADR, potential drug interactions, and management of an ADR. You will be asked to choose an appropriate drug or intravenous fluid with its corresponding dose, route, and frequency. Our advanced question bank platform allows you to filter PSA questions based on specialty and PSA question format. For Pass Application by post, applicants are required to come personally to PSA Pass Centre on the date of pass collection to have your fingerprint/Photo enrol onto the PSA Pass. There are 36 seconds per mark; if you are struggling to find an answer within a suitable time frame for the available marks, make a best guess (there is no negative marking) and move on.