Finals revision courses

Abstract

When the final year medical student is faced with a barrage of adverts for revision courses it is difficult to know which one to pick. In the United Kingdom, the number and variety of revision course providers seem to be growing every year. But do these courses prey on students’ insecurities and provide unnecessary repetition? Or do they provide an additional service that medical schools fail to supply? This is far from a comprehensive review, but we hope that this snapshot will shed some light for you amid the finals frenzy. The Medical Defence Union and Medical Protection Society courses focus on consolidating knowledge. Given the lottery of medical school placements, the comprehensive overviews and detailed revision notes from these courses were useful to identify our knowledge gaps. Lectures from practising clinicians were interspersed with real life anecdotes, giving memorable and clinically relevant learning points. We benefited from attending the courses before specific rotations—understanding ileal conduits, for example—before seeing a single surgical patient. Recommended for —Appreciation of breadth and depth of undergraduate syllabus. Time —Early in revision, perhaps even before medical …