New Exam Feedback - Physios
Congratulations to those who passed the recent September exam - it was great to see 100% pass rate again!
A few of these physios have kindly shared some feedback, please see below for what they thought.
First things first is don’t stress about the exam it looks super daunting with the concept of the exam covering all aspects of Physiotherapy however it’s really not that bad. The tips and recommendations would be read the assessment booklet it has a list of the aspects of Physiotherapy that can be covered in the exam and the different conditions that could be asked I used this to structure my revision topics. Which I then took and looked up on physiopedia as with signing up to the exam you get a year free subscription to physiopedia plus so definitely take advantage of this even for general CPD aswell as exam prep. I only graduated 7months ago therefore felt this really benefited myself as meant a lot of my knowledge for university was still there as I went to get a job in MSK once graduating therefore was really worried about the other more clinical hospital based questions. With each question the main thing to remember is patient safety before actual treatment or testing, so even on questions I didn’t know the conditions for I was able to attempt to clinically reason my choice in answer. My biggest difficulty was that with a lot of the questions as it’s multiple choice and you could clinically reason several of the answers. So I would recommend going over each question a few times and the choice of answers before confirming an answer. As you’ve plenty of time in the exam to do this, this was another worry of mine being dyslexic I worried I might of struggled for time and was kicking myself for not requesting extra time when initially applying for the exam but honestly you have plenty!
I personally started to revise for the exam one month prior, doing about 30mins/1hour each night. My revision involved completing the practice exam and revising the fundamentals I.e. ABGS for respiratory and red flags for MSK. I wouldn’t get too bogged down with various pathologies and special tests because there are so many and chances are they won’t come up on the exam. In fact, most of what I did revise didn’t really come up on the exam. My main advise would be to know your bread and butter, then you work through your answers. Also, heads up, there are a few outcome measures that have slightly different names in Australia.
The next available exam date is March which has a December 1st cutoff, as there are tasks you need to complete before this cut-off date now would be a great time to get started with the process!