You will rotate through a series of 20 stations—four stations are rest stations—and will undertake a variety of clinical tasks. All candidates in a clinical examination session will be assessed against the same stations. The four rest stations give you an opportunity to have a break between the scored stations.

Each station will be of 10 minutes duration (8 minutes for the actual assessment and 2 minutes for the changeover and reading of the written information for the next station). Stations may use actual patients, standardised patients or role-playing patients (where possible, appropriately aged individuals are used as role-playing patients). You should regard the role-playing patients as real patients and treat them accordingly.

Stations assess clinical skills in medicine, surgery, paediatrics, obstetrics, gynaecology, general practice and psychiatry. Scoring will be structured, with individual aspects of each station specified under the following broad headings:

• history
• physical examination
• investigations
• diagnosis/differential diagnosis
• therapeutics/management
• counselling/patient education
• clinical procedures.

The structured clinical assessments will make use of examiners from all disciplines.