Medical trainee's clinical exam pass rate trumps national average

Fifteen Townsville University Hospital medical registrars have passed the notoriously challenging Royal Australasian College of Physicians clinical exam notching up the health service’s best pass rate to date and exceeding the national pass rate average of 80 per cent.

Geriatric medicine trainee Dr Sonia Tait said she was thrilled to have passed the exam with so many of her peers.

“The exam is how you get from being a basic training registrar into advanced training and passing means we will definitely go into training in the speciality of our choice,” she said.

“These specialities include areas like nephrology, gerontology, haematology, neurology, cardiology and endocrinology.

“It is a huge professional barrier because if you can’t pass you can’t become a physician.”

Sonia said the exam was a clinical exam where trainees were examined on two long patient cases and four short cases.

“You have an hour with the long cases and 15 minutes for short cases where you are required to examine the patient, formulate a diagnosis and present a management plan,” she said.

“This exam is preceded by a written exam and once you pass that you go straight into preparing for the clinical.

“Because of COVID-19 the time between the written and clinical exam was drawn out which meant we had about 12 months of preparation.

“It was quite stressful because there were times the format of the exam was changing so often, we didn’t know if we were going to be able to do it at all.”

Endocrinology medicine trainee Dr Nick Boyer said the year preparing for the exam was mentally exhausting.

“Despite this, we’re extremely grateful for the wonderful physician training unit their all their support,” he said.

“They facilitated lots of practice exams and consultants and other advanced trainees supported us to do short and long case practice sessions.”

Neurology staff specialist and joint director physician education Dr Craig Costello said individually and collectively the exam results were a great outcome.

“It’s the most important hurdle for them to get through and now they can see their future clearly,” he said.

“From a hospital point of view, it’s our best result and that’s really a reflection on all the hard work they’ve put in and as well as the quality of trainers and consultant colleagues who have helped us achieve this milestone.

“The most challenging thing is having the confidence to believe you can do it and these trainees should all have that confidence.

“Trying to instil that confidence in them and getting them to remain focussed and work through the periods where they feel uncertain is hard.

“For this cohort, it’s been a much longer haul, like a lot of things impacted by COVID.

“Normally they would have had this done by July last year but this cohort has been in exam-mode for near on 18 months which has been very difficult for them to remain ‘up’ for that period of time.

“It’s a credit to them that we’ve got our best result in the most trying of circumstances.”

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