October oral boards

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pain2b

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Guys,

What anesthesia oral board course works best for us? Justoralboards? PM me if you know.

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Best oral board prep would be to practice oral boards with a person who is good at spotting your shortcomings. What makes it difficult is everyone has different shortcomings. The easiest one to fix is a fact deficiency, which is usually basic medicine, as the written boards already tested anesthesia knowledge, and those are passed already to be eligible for orals. Harder to fix is panic and thinking errors, but that is correctable with practice. Bottom line - it is not the course you take, it is the skill of the mock examiner in ID the problems (if any). YMMV and Good Luck!
 
I didnt take a course. I practiced mock scenarios with a group of friends.

Our residency program offered a mock oral program but they werent as informative or helpful as I had hoped.

The knowledge is there, it's just a matter of coherently tapping into it during a dynamic clinical scenario.
 
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I did take an oral board course.

going right in to Pain practice solo did not lend itself to a lot of colleagues being around to do board prep with.

if you want to spend the money as part of CME, try something like Michael Ho's course. at the very least, you get contact people to Skype with and practice oral board scenarios. its a lot of $$$ though. get your job to pay for it!



you can go cheap and are just as likely to pass. buy a used copy of one of the review books to do light reading, but most importantly, practice. practice with colleagues - facetime, Skype, over the phone for the technically challenged. do them in the car by yourself. with your pet, especially if it a loud obnoxious bird, with residency friends and attendings. do them in a house, with a mouse, here and there, anywhere... make sure that those people are critical towards your answers.
 
I did many many mock orals with my old faculty members. Probably over 25 mock exams. Used old aba oral stems.
 
Posted this on the anesthesiology forum but thought it may help you as well:

Passed! Huge relief and wanted to contribute to the forum since everyone here helped me through this process.

1. Ultimate board prep books 1-6 have all the information you need. Get through all the cases at least once so there are no surprises on the actual test date. No other sources are necessary— the answers in UBP are long and detailed but this leads to overpreparation.

2. Nothing can make up for practicing with a colleague or an examiner. I would recommend taking somewhere between 3-5 formal practice exams with feedback given to you after each one.

3. For the OSCE portion, the 16 page ABA PDF covers everything you need to know. The most challenging aspect of this is echo for those who are not regularly doing cardiac cases.

4. On the actual exam, you will get cut off, pushed on answers you give, and will have to transition to different topics rapidly. Take time to gather your thoughts before answering the question as your answers will be more fluid and concise. The exam pace is FAST!

5. Practice outlining so you can anticipate questions based on reading the stem.

6. I’m not sure that a course is necessary since a lot of your time during a course is spent learning passively. Practice verbalizing stem answers with a friend on a regular basis— this is probably the most useful way to prepare.

Good luck, one of the last exam hurdles to jump over before being board certified.
 
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If anyone needs the JustOralBoards student manual PM me
 
I did justoralboards.com a couple of years ago and was well prepared. It’s expensive but well worth it just to get that exam out of the way
 
I did the Ho course in person with a co-fellow of mine and highly recommend it. High yield review. Left with tons of notes. Saw many similar questions on my orals.
 
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