Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted here! I know it's a cliche, but time does fly once you're out there and working...
I took the Hospice and Palliative Medicine boards this year and figure I'd post on my resources and experience, in case it's helpful to anyone.
My experience was a little weird, as I finished my fellowship in 2020, scheduled my board exam, and then ended up cancelling it due to COVID. I wasn't excited about sitting in a test center in November, 2020, pre-vaccine and all. I've been working as a hospice medical director over the past two years, so have probably learned some stuff on the job, while forgetting other stuff I learned during fellowship (I'm looking at you, pediatrics...)
Lectures: I used the AAHPM online intensive board review lectures and also watched some MD Anderson lectures I found floating around. I tend to listen to lectures as I'm doing other stuff, so I found them both very helpful in this regard. They cover similar info with some differences. All in all, the MD Anderson lectures seemed a bit more comprehensive, IMO.
QBanks: I used the AAHPM offerings: Pass, and the three FAST modules. By objective standards, they're fairly terrible—not updated, ambiguously worded, and often cherry pick obscure details or focus on "guess what I'm thinking" questions. With that said, this is kind of how the board exam is
😉, so I was glad I did all these. There were several questions on the board that were similar to the AAHPM practice questions, that I likely would not have gotten if I hadn't done these and reviewed the answers in detail. My advice is to try not to think about how much you're paying per question and just accept that everything related to the boards is highway robbery. At least you will hopefully only need to do it once. There are some "Blogs to Boards" questions floating around, which I did. I didn't find these super helpful, but they are free.
Books: I read the AAHPM Primer of Palliative Care and as much of Unipac, aka Essentials, as I could handle. The Primer has lots of helpful info and is a pretty good one-stop resource. In contrast, Unipac is probably among the worst board review resources I've seen. It's not that it's poorly written or the info isn't relevant, I just found that the presentation was diffuse and not at all focused on giving you what you need to pass the boards. I was hoping for something like the First Aid series for the Steps; Unipac is not at all like that. Instead it's long, dense paragraphs of info with a few high-yield points scattered throughout. I found the tables the most helpful part. Perhaps Unipac is actually more oriented towards giving readers a broad overview of Hospice/Palliative medicine, rather than the focused board review I was expecting.
I took a risk on a couple other books. One was the "Hospice and Palliative Medicine and Supportive Care Flashcards". These aren't actually flashcards; they're multiple choice questions with explanations. The style is slightly different than the boards, but there are literally hundreds of questions on many topics, which was helpful for interactive practice. I also purchased "Evidence-Based Practice of Palliative Medicine" late in my studying, partially 'cause it seemed like a helpful resource for the work, not just the boards. If you think about questions, they will tend to be come from areas where there is evidence to draw upon, so I did find some of this helpful, almost like a literature review.
Fast Facts is also a great resource. It's just kind of hard to know where to focus, since at this point there are so many entries. If I'd had more time, I probably would have tried to read through more of these to identify the topics that seem high yield.
The test itself covered so much material, it's hard to generalize about what is "high yield". The blueprint on the
ABIM website seemed like a relatively accurate representation of the test, it's just hard to know from this where to focus and what you really need to have memorized. Perhaps that's just the nature of board exams. The resource section of the testing software does provide an opioid equianalgesic chart, as well as things like the FAST scale and MELD score, so don't waste time trying to commit these to memory.
I took the test on November 1st. Still waiting for results...
