This workflow is for higher specialty trainees in palliative medicine, usually in their penultimate training year and within about six weeks of the written Specialty Certificate Examination, who want an honest read on where they stand. It uses the Association for Palliative Medicine's (APM) curated resources for one job — anchoring your revision to official material — and a separate bank for question volume. The principal limitation is blunt: the APM is not a question bank and cannot supply your practice volume.
Start with that honesty, because it changes how you use everything else. The value of the APM's resources is not that they drill you with hundreds of items; it is that they point you at the material the examiners actually build the paper from — the current curriculum, the Federation's own practice questions, and the palliative formulary the answers are keyed to. Treat that curated official material as your calibration standard, and treat StudyPRN, Licence Medical, iatroX or any other bank as the place you generate volume. Confusing the two is the most common way a strong clinician wastes the final month.
What the APM offers for SCE Palliative Medicine right now
Current-state box, last checked 21 July 2026. The Association for Palliative Medicine of Great Britain and Ireland (apmonline.org) is a specialty membership organisation, not a revision vendor. It does not publish a question count, an adaptive engine, a mock-exam platform, or a per-item price, because it does not sell a bank. What it provides for candidates is curation and access:
- Signposting to the official MRCP(UK)/Federation SCE in Palliative Medicine page and the official practice paper.
- Links to the current Palliative Medicine curriculum (2022) and the ARCP decision aids that map the syllabus.
- Access, for members, to the Palliative Care Formulary (PCF) and to palliative-care guideline collections — the medicines and symptom-control reference the exam is keyed to.
- Signposting to third-party revision banks (its trainee pages point at StudyPRN's palliative bank and at St Gemma's pallmedpro.com revision platform) and to recommended reading.
- Journal access (Palliative Medicine, BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care) and trainee-committee and wellbeing support.
Everything above is membership-dependent and subject to change; verify current inclusions on apmonline.org before you rely on any single item. The signposted vendor figures (for example StudyPRN's bank size) are vendor-reported and belong on the vendor's page, not the APM's — check them at source.
The exam you are calibrating against
The SCE in Palliative Medicine is a written specialty certificate examination delivered by the Federation of the Royal Colleges of Physicians. Its structure is fixed and shared with every other physicianly SCE: two papers of 100 best-of-five (BOF) questions each, 200 questions in total, three hours per paper, sat on one day, computer-based at a test centre, one mark per correct answer, and no negative marking. What differs is the blueprint. The current blueprint (updated 2023) covers the 2010 and 2022 Palliative Medicine curricula and distributes the 200 questions approximately as follows.
| Blueprint domain | Questions (both papers) | Approx. share |
|---|---|---|
| Other symptoms/clinical problems secondary to life-limiting disease | 48 | 24% |
| Pharmacology and therapeutics | 35 | 17.5% |
| Care of the dying patient | 20 | 10% |
| Concurrent clinical problems unrelated to progressive illness | 20 | 10% |
| Management of emergencies | 20 | 10% |
| Palliation of life-limiting disease | 20 | 10% |
| Legal issues | 15 | 7.5% |
| Pain | 15 | 7.5% |
| Practical procedures | 5 | 2.5% |
| Rehabilitation | 2 | 1% |
The Federation notes the actual distribution may vary slightly. The load-bearing point is that symptom control, pharmacology and pain together make up nearly half the paper, and that "concurrent problems unrelated to progressive illness" is a full tenth — a general-medicine domain that pure palliative reading tends to under-cover. Confirm the live blueprint on thefederation.uk before your sitting.
Inventory your official material — and label it honestly
Official material is scarce and non-renewable, so its value depends entirely on it staying unseen until you deliberately spend it. Inventory every piece the APM points you at and label each item, because a practice paper you have already worked through in a study group is no longer a calibration instrument.
| Official/curated item | Role | Honest label |
|---|---|---|
| Federation SCE practice paper / official sample questions | The gold-standard calibration set | "Unseen" only if untouched — protect it |
| Federation blueprint (2023) | Coverage map, not a test | Reference |
| Palliative Medicine 2022 curriculum + ARCP decision aid | Scope definition | Reference |
| Palliative Care Formulary (PCF) / palliative formularies | Medicines-answer authority | Reference (use the SmPC/eMC for licensing detail) |
| StudyPRN palliative bank (signposted) | Third-party volume | "Attempted once" after first pass — do not recycle for calibration |
| Study-group questions you have already discussed | — | "Contaminated by review" — worthless as a readiness signal |
If your only untouched official item is a single practice paper, that is your one honest calibration bullet. Do not fire it early, do not fire it in fragments, and do not "just check a couple" — a half-seen paper is a contaminated paper.
Choose the calibration date
Pick a date late enough that your revision has had time to work, but early enough that the result can still change your plan. For most trainees revising around clinical shifts, that is four to six weeks out. Earlier than six weeks and you are calibrating a version of yourself who will not sit the exam; later than three weeks and a bad result leaves no runway to correct a whole weak domain. Put the date in your calendar as a fixed appointment, protect the hours as if they were a night on call, and tell your team you are unavailable.
Reproduce exam conditions exactly
The whole point of a calibration sitting is that the number it produces is trustworthy, which means the conditions must match the real paper, not a comfortable approximation. Sit one three-hour block of 100 BOF questions in a single uninterrupted run. No phone, no formulary open, no pausing to read around an item, no discussing a stem with a colleague. Use the same on-screen, single-best-answer response format, flag-and-review behaviour and pacing you will use on the day — roughly 1.8 minutes per question. Take the break you would take between real papers if you sit both. The discomfort is the measurement: a score obtained with the PCF open at your elbow tells you nothing about the exam.
Code every error — by domain, process and format
When you mark the paper, resist the urge to simply reread explanations. For every wrong or guessed item, record three things beyond the subject: the blueprint domain, the cognitive process that failed, and the format that caught you out.
- Domain: which of the ten blueprint areas — and is the miss in a big-share domain (symptom control, pharmacology, pain) or a small one (rehabilitation, procedures)?
- Cognitive process: was it a knowledge gap (you did not know the fact), a reasoning gap (you knew the facts but drew the wrong management line), a calculation slip (opioid conversion, breakthrough dosing), or a misread (you knew it and still picked the distractor)?
- Format: long integrated stem, data/trend interpretation, an ethics-and-law vignette, or a drug-conversion item?
A candidate who misses eight symptom-control questions because of opioid-conversion calculation slips has a completely different problem from one who misses eight because of genuine knowledge gaps in nausea pathways — and the same raw domain score hides that. The coding, not the percentage, is the output of the sitting.
Map each error to fresh third-party practice
Now the APM's curation earns its keep. For every coded error, go back to the authoritative source it signposts — the 2022 curriculum for scope, the PCF and SmPC/eMC for the medicines fact, the relevant guideline for the management line — and fix the concept once, properly. Then, and only then, generate volume against that concept using a bank, never by re-reading the official item. Keep the official practice paper out of daily repetition entirely: its job was to calibrate, and re-drilling it just teaches you the paper. Daily volume comes from StudyPRN, Licence Medical, iatroX or whichever bank you have chosen, targeted at the domains your coding flagged.
Repeat only with genuinely unseen material
A calibration sitting can only be repeated honestly if the second instrument is genuinely unseen. If a new official sample is released, or you have deliberately ring-fenced a second untouched official paper, use it. If not — and for most candidates it will not be — do not re-sit the same paper and call the higher score progress; that is recognition, not readiness. Instead, build a mixed transfer sitting from bank items you have not seen: a fresh 100-question timed block, blueprint-weighted, drawn from questions you have not previously attempted. That is what iatroX is for in this protocol — a source of unseen, cross-specialty, timed items to re-measure transfer without spending irreplaceable official material.
Worked example: a seven-day plan around clinical work
Assume a trainee, four weeks out, working a normal clinical week, who has just calibrated and coded the following top gaps: opioid-conversion calculation slips, two weak symptom domains (respiratory secretions, delirium), and shaky capacity/best-interests reasoning. Here the APM does one defined job — it is the source of official scope and formulary authority — and iatroX does another: adaptive, unseen transfer practice. No proprietary-algorithm claims are made here; "adaptive" means the plan simply re-weights toward your flagged domains.
| Day | APM's one job (official anchor) | Volume/transfer job (bank) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | PCF + SmPC/eMC: opioid conversion ratios cold | 20 pharmacology/pain items, mark and code | 45 min |
| Tue | 2022 curriculum: respiratory-secretions scope | 20 symptom-control items on the flagged domain | 40 min |
| Wed | Guideline read: delirium at end of life | 20 mixed items, note repeat error types | 40 min |
| Thu | Legal-issues reference: capacity, best interests, DoLS | 15 ethics/law items | 35 min |
| Fri | Rest the official material; light formulary review | 20 unseen mixed transfer items in iatroX, timed | 40 min |
| Sat | — | 50-question timed mixed block, blueprint-weighted | 90 min |
| Sun | Recode the week's errors against the blueprint | Re-test only the concepts still failing | 45 min |
Notice the official material is consulted, not drilled, and never re-used as a mock. The bank supplies the repetitions; the APM's curation supplies the authority for what "correct" means.
Decision checklist: continue, supplement, switch or stop
Base the decision on measured gaps, not novelty or how much you have already paid for a resource.
- Continue this APM-anchored protocol if your coded errors are shrinking week on week and your unseen timed blocks are trending up across the big-share domains.
- Supplement with a dedicated specialty bank now if you have run out of fresh official items and your volume is too thin to expose gaps — most candidates need one specialty SCE bank plus a cross-specialty measurement layer.
- Switch your primary bank only if a stratified sample of its items is out of step with current guidance or is recycling recognisable stems; switching for variety alone destroys calibration.
- Stop doing new questions in a domain once your unseen accuracy there is comfortably above your target and stable — pouring more volume into a solved domain is time stolen from a weak one.
Bottom line
The APM's resources are a curation and authority layer, not a question bank, and used that way they are a genuine asset: they tell you what the exam is made of and what the right answer is keyed to. Anchor one honest calibration sitting to the official material the APM points you at, code your errors by domain, process and format, then buy your volume elsewhere and measure transfer on unseen items. That division of labour — official material for truth, a bank for repetitions, an unseen layer for calibration — is the whole protocol.
Frequently asked questions
Is Association for Palliative Medicine Resources enough for SCE Palliative Medicine on its own? No, and the APM does not claim to be. Its resources are curation, formulary access and signposting, not a practice bank, so they cannot supply the question volume a written SCE demands. Use the APM to anchor scope and to reach the official practice paper and the Palliative Care Formulary, and pair it with at least one dedicated question bank for volume and one unseen-item layer for calibration.
Which SCE Palliative Medicine component does Association for Palliative Medicine Resources not reproduce well? It does not reproduce timed, unseen, mixed-domain question practice at all, because it is not a bank — there is no 100-item paper to sit under exam conditions inside the APM's own resources. It also cannot give you a readiness percentage. Those jobs belong to a practice bank and to a genuine calibration sitting built from unseen items.
How many Association for Palliative Medicine Resources questions should I complete per day for SCE Palliative Medicine? This is the wrong unit for the APM, because it is not a per-day question source. A better daily target is volume from your chosen bank — for most trainees revising around clinical work, 20 to 40 marked, coded items a day is sustainable — while the APM is consulted only when a coded error needs an authoritative fix from the curriculum, guideline or formulary.
When should I stop using Association for Palliative Medicine Resources and move to mixed mocks? You never fully stop using it, because its curriculum, formulary and guideline references remain the authority you check answers against right up to the exam. What you should stop doing, once your domain floors are met, is topic-by-topic reading; from that point your primary activity becomes unseen, timed, mixed-domain blocks, with the APM's resources used only to resolve specific disputed items.
How should I combine Association for Palliative Medicine Resources with iatroX without duplicating practice? Give each a single, non-overlapping job. The APM's resources are your official-scope and formulary authority; iatroX is your source of unseen, cross-specialty, timed items for measuring transfer — the concurrent-problems, pharmacology and emergency knowledge palliative questions lean on. Because iatroX is a general UK/MRCP-level bank rather than a palliative-specific one, it duplicates nothing in the APM's curated set; it supplies the measurement the curation cannot.
Editorial notes and references
Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 21 July 2026. Vendor and membership-body inclusions change without notice; every figure attributed to a third party here is vendor-reported or organisation-reported and should be confirmed at source before you rely on it. Disclosure: iatroX operates a UK question bank and therefore competes with the specialty banks mentioned; its role in this article is confined to the job the APM does not claim — unseen, cross-specialty, timed measurement — and it is not positioned as a palliative-specific SCE bank, which it is not. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com.
References: Federation of the Royal Colleges of Physicians — SCE in Palliative Medicine (thefederation.uk) and the SCE in Palliative Medicine Blueprint (updated 2023); Association for Palliative Medicine trainee and SCE-support resources (apmonline.org); the Palliative Care Formulary and SmPC/eMC for medicines detail. Internal: the iatroX UK SCE Palliative Medicine question layer at /quiz-landing, the SCE Palliative Medicine content-gap checklist, the iatroX comparison hub, and Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score.
Run a fresh timed block in iatroX and decide your next move — learn, retest, simulate or stop →