Missing a critical action on oral boards

[pinipig523]

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Is this bad?

 

[Daiphon]

...

You're assuming that you know what the critical actions were. For example, in an APAP overdose case, "consult tox" may not actually be a critical action. In the real world it is, but in ABEM-land it may not be (especially as the consultants are frequently unavailable for real time usefulness). Sometimes the CAs are really asinine...

That being said, as I understand it, blowing a critical action is an auto-fail for the case. However, there's some pretty impressive mathematical gymnastics that occur in this situation that involve averaging your scores from all your cases into one "mega case" or something like that... and basing your overall pass/fail on that über-score. Unless you really mucked up, you should come out okay from this process.

Bottom line: blow one critical and fail oral boards you ought not.

Cheers!
-d

Edited to be in line with OP's changes. d=)

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[BlueStructure]

I think it only makes you fail the piece of that case that the critical action deals with, like "professionalism" or "medical knowledge" (I don't quite remember the individual categories exactly) but you can still do ok on the other areas and overall pass the case. Even if you really screw up an entire case you can still pass the test. The pass rate when I took it was 99%, which makes me wonder if the oral boards are even necessary after the written test.

 

[pinipig523]

I think it only makes you fail the piece of that case that the critical action deals with, like "professionalism" or "medical knowledge" (I don't quite remember the individual categories exactly) but you can still do ok on the other areas and overall pass the case. Even if you really screw up an entire case you can still pass the test. The pass rate when I took it was 99%, which makes me wonder if the oral boards are even necessary after the written test.

This is what I was thinking - that the critical action miss would affect only the 1 of 8 portions of the subscores.

If you miss a critical action and you fail the entire case... man that's a tough test eh?

 

[WilcoWorld]

I second Diaphon - if you nailed the management without calling the poison center, I doubt you'd fail the case.

 

[Apollyon]

I thought that the oral board cases were a bit goofy (but this was 2 years ago) - however, as I considered further, I figured one HAD to be a test case (because the examiner defied logic and physics with the case). There was one where I identified the problem specifically, but could NOT think of the actual name of the issue (like looking at the door, and saying "the brass thing you turn to open it", but could not think of "doorknob"), but got the management right on, so I don't think that that hurt me.

And I passed, so whatever!

 

[EM_Rebuilder]

I would be very careful discussing any particulars. If this was indeed the 'critical action' you think you might have missed, I would remove the post or edit it to be a tab bit less specfic.

I would just hate to see someone on here be made a model case for ABEMs testing policies...

 

[ccfccp]

I would be very careful discussing any particulars. If this was indeed the 'critical action' you think you might have missed, I would remove the post or edit it to be a tab bit less specfic.

I would just hate to see someone on here be made a model case for ABEMs testing policies...

Agreed. Your original post was pretty generic, but they seemed pretty serious about crucifying people discussing the test.

Although, I also agree that the most disconcerting part of preparing for the test was what the book I was reading noted as "critical actions." A lot of them I didn't even think were necessarily standard of care, even with explanation. As mentioned above, though, the pass rate is ridiculously high, so I wouldn't worry to much about it.

 

[Rendar5]

be vewwy caweful about discussing cases =p.leave every detail out =p in fact, don't specify what you think you screwed up on 😉

 

[pinipig523]

I tried to be as vague as possible especially since it was just the best example I could think of... but probably best to be even vague-er. Thanks all.

 

[Daiphon]

I tried to be as vague as possible especially since it was just the best example I could think of... but probably best to be even vague-er. Thanks all.

Good call. My response has been tweaked.

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