Is RTP training enough?

fracgp exam Jul 10, 2018

 

Thanks for joining me on this training.

My name is Dr. Tom Rolley for Graduate Medicine.

Look, I want to drop in around a possible situation that you may find yourself in, if you are a GP Registrar, and that is that perhaps your goals as a GP Registrar and the goals of your RTP may be a little bit divergent.

And what I mean by that is, that your RTP may have the distant goal to make you into a good GP and your goal, yes is definitely still going to be, yeah I want to be a good GP, but also you've got this other thing called the FRACGP exam.

So what I want to bring to your attention is could they be divergent?

Could those two things be in fact, divergent?

And the worry that may come to you is, is it enough? Is the RTP training enough?

And so the question that I'll have you consider is, is it possible to be a good GP and still fail the exam?

The RTP goes, yes you are a good GP and yet you show up to the exams, boom, and fail. Is that possible? And I would say yes, it is.

Why?

Because being a good GP doesn't necessarily get you the skills to pass the exams. Let me ask you a different question, then.

The alternative is, is it possible to pass the exam and be a bad GP? Is it possible to pass the exam and still be a bad GP?

And certainly you might say, well look at that guy that passed that exam ten years ago and he's not a fantastic GP.

But most people certainly as they one, two, three years post exam, if they passed the exam then they are a good GP.

It's pretty unlikely.

Maybe someone's going to get through AKT but it's unlikely that they're going to pass the KFP or the OSCE and be a "bad GP", that they're inadequate for Australian standards.

So, what the possibility could be that I'm going to offer you is just to shift your focus.

If you're thinking about sitting the exam 2019 one, 2019 two, or 2020, that if you shift your focus to, okay great if I'm passing this exam I know I'm going to be a good GP.

And it takes that risk out of being- the worry that I am enough just having been through the RTP?

So, what's my suggestions?

What are the needed skills?

Okay, I've got four for you.

Clinical knowledge.

You're going to need your clinical knowledge to get through the exams.

Clinical skills.

You're going to need to know what to do as a good GP around your clinical skills.

Clinical Reasoning

You're going to need to know how to think, how to reason, how to work out when the patient walks in the room and they give a presented complaint or their story about what's going on, to work out what's actually going on.

Exam Performance

And then last of all, the key that you may need, even if you had all of those three, is exam performance.

How are you going to show up and manage the nerves, manage your capacity to take all of that work that you put in and actually show up on the exam day.

So they're the big four -  knowledge, skills, reasoning and exam performance.

And just to go ahead and flag that in the future, those exam performance skills - they're going to show up as self care for yourself as a good GP. How are you going to look after your own capacity to remain in this relatively demanding experience of being a GP?

All right, so if you liked that and you'd like some more resources, then hop over to GraduateMedicine.com.

Particularly helpful may be the study plan at graduatemedicine.com/fracgp_study_plans.

So if you'd like that, you can pop in your details there and we'll send it over.

I look forward to serving you again on another training for Graduate Medicine soon.

Close

50% Complete

Two Step

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.