MRCPsych

MRCPsych (Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists) is a postnominal qualification awarded to physicians who have completed the prescribed training requirements and membership examinations mandated by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Candidates must be registered with the GMC or a recognized medical board in their own country and should have undergone three years of training. Although initially a two-part exam, the examination has undergone a radical change in the past few years, notably in terms of focus and structure.

Although originally a two-part exam, the current examination is 3 parts, consisting of 2 written papers (Paper A and Paper B) and a clinical exam (CASC). Paper A focuses on Neuroscience, Pharmacology, Psychology and theory, while Paper B focuses on Current Clinical Practice & Evidence within General Adult and the various subspecialties of Psychiatry, Epidemiology, Statistics, Critical Appraisal and Psychotherapy

The Royal college of psychiatrists has announced the change of format of the CASC exam changes for the exam in January 2018. The 4 linked stations in the morning session will now become 8 single stations with 4 minute to read and 7 minutes to complete the task. 6 of these will be patient management focus and the other 2 history taking. The other 8 single stations remain the same format 90 s to read and 7 minutes for the exam.

There are resources and books like Pass the Casc by Dr Seshni Moodliar from the Eastern Psych Course which has been edited to reflect the new changes of the CASC exams.

From March 2008, the MRCPsych exam was changed from a two-part exam to a four-part exam, driven by changes in postgraduate education. This meant that there were now three written exams and a Clinical Assessment of Skills & Competencies (CASC). In order to obtain membership candidates currently need to complete 30 months post foundation/internship experience in Psychiatry and a pass in all components of the MRCPsych Examinations.

The MRCPsych examination consisted of a Part 1 and a Part 2 exam, both of which had written and clinical parts.

Part I: Written examination: The written paper comprised 133 Individual Statement Questions and 30 Extended Matching Questions based on themes stated in the syllabus. The examination was of 90 minutes duration. The examination carried a total of 223 marks - 133 marks for the Individual Statements (IS) and 90 for the Extended matching items (EMI). Combined IS and EMI marks were converted into a closed score between 0 and 10.

Clinical examination: The clinical examination consisted of Objective Structured Clinical examination stations (OSCE). The OSCE comprised 12 stations which are chosen with a view to sample across the range of psychiatric knowledge and skill areas appropriate to expected level of competency. Each station was 7 minutes duration. Candidates were required to complete all stations. The duration of the OSCE circuit was 1 hour and 36 minutes.

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