It would be easy, given what we do, to tell you that AI practice is all you need. It is not, and we would not say it. Practising consultations with colleagues remains one of the most valuable things a registrar can do — and the most useful way to think about an AI platform is as something that supplements peer practice, fills the gaps it cannot cover, and is available when your colleagues are not.

Why peer practice still matters

A real person playing your patient does things no system fully replicates. They surprise you. They go off-script, get emotional in unexpected ways, pause awkwardly, push back on your management plan. Learning to stay composed and responsive when a consultation does not go to plan is a skill that peer practice teaches especially well.

And the feedback runs both ways. Playing the patient or the observer for a colleague is not downtime: watching someone else consult, and having to articulate what worked and what did not, sharpens your own awareness of good technique. Some of the most useful learning in a peer group happens when you are not the one in the hot seat.

The practical problems with peer practice

The difficulty is rarely the value; it is the logistics. Getting three or four registrars in the same place at the same time is hard. When you do, you spend a fair amount of it waiting your turn. You need good cases to work from, and writing them takes time. And the feedback, while valuable, is necessarily subjective — it depends on who happens to be observing and how confident they feel giving honest critique to a peer.

None of this makes peer practice less worthwhile. It just means it cannot be your only method, because you cannot do it on demand and you cannot do enough of it.

Two free tools to make peer practice easier

We keep two aids free for the whole GP training community precisely because they make peer practice better, not just solo practice.

The first is our SCA timer: run it in the background of a peer session and nobody has to play timekeeper, while everyone gets used to consulting at exam pace.

The second is our SCA Case Creator, which generates realistic scenarios on demand, each with a doctor briefing, a patient briefing, and a full marking scheme, built around RCGP case-design principles. The point of it is that it does the prompting for you. Rather than working out how to ask an AI for a good case every time, you simply tell it the area you want to practise and it produces a properly structured scenario, so your group spends its time consulting rather than writing material. You can generate as many as you like, in whatever clinical area you and your colleagues want to work on. One honest note: the cases are AI-generated and intended for consultation skills practice (pacing, structure, communication), not as a clinical reference; they may contain medical inaccuracies and should not be used for clinical decisions.

Where AI consultation practice fits

Think of it as the layer that covers what peer practice cannot. It is available at eleven at night when no colleague is free. It gives consistent, structured feedback that does not depend on who is observing. It lets you build stamina across a long run of cases without coordinating anyone’s diary. And it can look across all your cases to find patterns a single observer never would.

The strongest preparation uses both. Peer practice for the human unpredictability and the two-way learning; AI practice for the availability, consistency, volume, and cross-case insight. Lean on each for what it does best, and the two together cover far more ground than either alone.