Registrars sometimes ask whether they are “practising the right way.” Usually there is no single right way — but there is a right way for where you currently are. The kind of practice that serves an ST1 still finding their feet is not the same as what an ST3 weeks from the SCA needs. Matching your method to your stage matters more than any individual technique.

Earlier in training: build style and confidence

If you are earlier in your training, the goal is not exam performance; it is developing your own consultation style and the confidence to use it. At this stage you benefit from repetition without pressure. You want to try an opening one way, see how it lands, then try it differently. You want to fumble a consultation, learn from it, and go again without it costing you anything.

This is why low-stakes, repeatable practice is so valuable early on. You are experimenting, and experimentation needs room to fail. A registrar who can reattempt a case, trying a different approach the second or third time, develops a flexible, personal style far faster than one who treats every attempt as a verdict.

Giving you more than one attempt at a case matters here. Being able to come back to the same scenario and try it differently is what turns a single performance into actual learning, and it is exactly the room to experiment that building a style requires.

Closer to the exam: structured coverage

As you move toward the SCA, the priority shifts. You have a style now; the job becomes making sure it holds up across the breadth of the curriculum, and under the conditions of the exam. Here, working through a wide range of cases (ideally once each, the way you would in the real assessment) matters more than drilling the same scenario repeatedly. The aim is coverage and consistency rather than experimentation.

This is a different mode of practice. Early on, depth on a few cases builds your foundation. Later, breadth across many cases tests and proves it. Knowing which mode you are in stops you wasting effort — there is little point drilling one case forty times the week before the exam, just as there is little point racing through the whole curriculum once in your first year before you have a style to test.

How one course serves both stages

You do not need a different product for each stage — you need one that lets you practise in both modes and shift between them as you progress. That is how our course is built: a large bank of trainer-designed cases across the breadth of the RCGP curriculum, each with up to 3 attempts.

Earlier on, use the attempts. Take a case, try it, learn from the feedback, and come back to it — reattempting and experimenting is exactly how you build a flexible style, and having more than one go at a scenario is what turns a single performance into real learning. Closer to the exam, change how you use the same bank: work across a wide range of cases, treating each as the real thing, to test that your style holds up under exam conditions, across the full spread of presentations, and that you can finish on time. Same course, two ways of working it, matched to where you are.

The takeaway

Before your next practice session, ask yourself honestly where you are. Are you still building a style, or proving one? If the former, use your attempts to reattempt and experiment rather than treating each case as a one-off verdict. If the latter, spread yourself across the curriculum and treat each case as the real thing. Match the method to the moment, and every session does more for you.