Workforce, training and education
East of England

Trainee Resources

SCE (Special Certificate Examination) in Elderly Medicine Resources

A. Best of Five MCQs for the Geriatric Medicine SCE (Oxford Higher Specialty Training Higher Revision) Duncan Forsyth (Author), Stephen Wallis (Author)  - Excellent resource, best book I used for the exam and I can highly recommend. The answers come with a brief explanation and references.

B. MCQs in Geriatric Medicine for Postgraduate Examinations (MasterPass) (MasterPass Series) [Paperback] Roger Gabriel (Author) - gives 350 questions but poorly written and some of the answers are incorrect. If you want to cover as many questions as possible go nuts otherwise avoid.

C. Rapid Review of Medicine in Old Age (Medical Rapid Review Series) [Paperback] Michael Vassallo (Author), Stephen Allen (Author) - Written by the man who writes the SCE, however the book is 7 years out of date. It is worth looking through to get an idea of his writing style. The questions do not reflect the SCE format so my advice would be borrowing it from colleagues or the library.

D. Essential Geriatrics [Paperback] Henry Woodford (Author) - Excellent book, highly recommended even to people not taking the exam. Easy to digest and every statement is referenced. Good bank of 100 questions however I think these questions are a little harder than the exam.

E. Lecture Notes: Elderly Care Medicine [Paperback] Claire G. Nicholl (Author), K. Jane Wilson (Author) - Another excellent book, gives a good grounding although a little more basic than Woodford's book but it does have details regarding ethics, law, walking aids which are all known to come up in the exam.

F. British Geriatric Society - this is the most comprehensive collection of mock SCE papers. These are probably of similar standard to the actual exam. I believe they have 3 or 4 mock papers on there.

G. BGS Trainees’ weekend - very useful revision/update weekend for about £75. They try to cover topics from the exam and give a SCE mock exam.

H. MRCP 2 websites - consider signing up to these to practice exam technique. Also some of the questions in the actual exam felt a lot more like MRCP 2 than SCE so may be more helpful than it first seems.

Research for the Geriatrics Trainee

Geriatrics has an evolving research wing, with trials like CHARMER ongoing. For the interested trainees:

Furthermore we are pleased to be able to gain the consent of Dr Martyn Patel at NNUH to share information and experience. If you are interested please let the geriatrics trainee reps know and we can give you his work email

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