eMedica is a UK-focused MRCGP AKT question bank and mock-exam service for GP trainees at ST2–ST3 who want a domain-weighted bank plus full-length practice papers. It is a competent, exam-shaped resource with concise explanations built around UK primary care. Its principal limitation is that it is largely a static bank: there is no adaptive tutor and little scaffolding to convert a weak result into structured retrieval, so you must build the diagnose-to-retest loop yourself.
What eMedica offers for the MRCGP AKT right now
The figures below are vendor-reported and were last checked on 19 July 2026. Confirm the current count, access period and price on the eMedica product page before you buy, because promotional bundles change.
- Question bank size: eMedica advertises over 2,250 questions across the three AKT domains (clinical, evidence interpretation, organisational).
- Question formats: single best answer, extended matching, short answer and picture/data items. Note that the live AKT from October 2025 is single-best-answer style, so the SBA subset is the format that matters most.
- Mocks: four short "mini" mocks plus a full 160-question Mock A included in the main package; further full papers (Mock B and Mock C) are sold separately, vendor-reported at around £30 each for a two-week window or roughly £69 for the three-mock bundle.
- Access and price: the main bank is sold by duration, vendor-reported from about £49 for one month to about £129 for twelve months, with intermediate two-, three-, four- and six-month tiers.
- Feedback: concise written explanations and notes attach to each item; there is no adaptive sequencing, no Socratic AI tutor and no spaced-repetition scheduler described on the product pages.
- Adjacent products: eMedica also runs MSRA, SJT and MRCGP SCA preparation, so trainees often meet the brand earlier in the pathway.
If any of those numbers has moved when you read this, treat the product page as the source of truth and this audit as the framework.
The exam you are actually sitting
The MRCGP Applied Knowledge Test changed in October 2025. It is now 160 single-best-answer questions in two hours forty minutes (previously 200 questions in three hours ten minutes), delivered four times a year in January, April, July and October at Pearson VUE test centres. The official RCGP weighting is approximately 80% clinical medicine, 10% evidence-based practice (research interpretation, critical appraisal and the statistics that support them) and 10% organisational content — the administrative, ethical, regulatory and statutory frameworks of UK general practice.
Two distinctions matter for any audit. First, the RCGP content guide defines what is assessed; a vendor's topic list is a claim about coverage, not a syllabus. Second, the pace is roughly one minute per item, so a bank is only useful if it trains recognition speed, not just eventual recall. Hold every eMedica feature against those official facts rather than against a competitor's marketing.
A component-by-component inventory
| Component | Present in eMedica? | What it does | The job it should own |
|---|---|---|---|
| Question bank | Yes (2,250+, vendor-reported) | Domain-tagged SBA and legacy-format items with explanations | Breadth and recognition drill |
| Written notes/explanations | Yes, concise | Per-item rationale | Just-in-time teaching |
| Videos | Not a core feature | — | — |
| Flashcards | Not a core feature | — | — |
| Full mocks | Yes (Mock A included; B/C extra) | 160-item timed papers | Timed simulation and pacing |
| AI/adaptive tutor | No | — | — |
| Analytics | Basic score/topic feedback | Weak-area signalling | Diagnosis of gaps |
| Community/human feedback | Via wider eMedica courses | Tutor contact on paid courses | Coaching and accountability |
The honest reading is that eMedica concentrates its strength in two boxes — the bank and the full mocks — and leaves three of the jobs on the right (structured teaching, adaptive diagnosis and spaced retrieval) mostly to the candidate.
Mapping components to the AKT format — and finding the overlaps
Map each feature to the exam and the redundancy becomes visible. The bank and the mini-mocks both test the same recognition skill; the difference is only timing and volume. The full mocks are the one component that trains the specific thing the others cannot — sustained pace across 160 items with no feedback until the end. That is a genuinely distinct asset, and the audit conclusion is to ration it: two or three full papers taken cold across a revision cycle tell you far more than the same papers picked apart question by question.
Where eMedica does not duplicate itself is instructive too. There is no video layer duplicating the notes, and no flashcard engine duplicating the bank, which keeps the product lean. The gap is on the other side: nothing in the platform closes the loop from "I got this wrong" to "I can now retrieve the correct rule cold two days later." That loop is where most marks are actually won.
Content-fidelity audit
Blueprint coverage. The three-domain split is advertised and broadly credible, but you should verify it against your own dashboard rather than the headline. Build a quick coverage matrix — the completion-is-not-coverage method is designed for exactly this — and check that the 10% evidence and 10% organisational slices are genuinely populated, not padded with a handful of repeated statistics items.
Cognitive level. The current AKT rewards higher-order problem-solving, not factual recall. Sample twenty items and ask how many require you to apply a guideline to a novel vignette versus simply recognise a fact. A bank that skews to recall will flatter your percentage and under-prepare you.
Image and data use. The live exam uses pictorial and data-interpretation items. eMedica's picture/data format is a plus here; confirm the images are legible and clinically current.
Recency. UK guidance moves. Check when the explanations were last revised against current NICE and CKS positions and the relevant SmPC/eMC entries for any medicines question. Undated explanations are a risk in every bank, eMedica included.
Jurisdiction. This is a UK GP exam; thresholds, referral pathways and administrative rules are UK-specific. eMedica is built for UK general practice, which is one of its real strengths over generalist international banks.
Explanation quality. The explanations are concise. For a strong candidate that is efficient; for a weaker candidate it can be thin, because a two-line rationale rarely names the misconception that produced the wrong answer. That is the single most useful thing an explanation can do, and concise notes seldom do it.
The workflow audit — from weakness to retest
Trace the path a learner must walk. eMedica will tell you a topic is weak (analytics), let you read why an item was wrong (notes) and let you attempt more items (bank). What it will not do is schedule the retest, force you to commit an answer and rationale before revealing the explanation, or route a specific misconception into a spaced review. Those steps are manual. For a disciplined trainee that is fine. For a busy one revising around clinical sessions, the missing scaffolding is where good intentions quietly leak away.
The modality gap — statistics, guideline recency and practice administration
The two 10% domains are where banks most often disappoint, and they are worth a deliberate stress-test.
- Statistics and critical appraisal: does eMedica make you calculate and interpret — likelihood ratios, number needed to treat, sensitivity and specificity, confidence intervals — or does it only ask you to define terms? Only the former transfers to the exam.
- Guideline recency (NICE, CKS and SmPC/eMC): sample the medicines and management items and confirm they reflect current UK sources rather than a superseded position.
- Practice administration: the organisational domain covers sick notes, DVLA rules, safeguarding routes, statutory duties and NHS regulatory frameworks. Confirm these are populated for the current UK context, not a legacy version.
If any of these three is thin, that is precisely the gap a second, unseen bank should fill — measured on items you have never seen, not on eMedica's own retries.
A decision table: best use by stage, time and budget
| Learner stage | Time to exam | Budget | Best use of eMedica |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early ST2, building coverage | 12+ weeks | Modest | Main bank as the breadth engine; save the full mocks |
| Mid-revision, gaps known | 4–12 weeks | Moderate | Targeted topic sets + one full mock for pacing |
| Final fortnight | <4 weeks | Any | Full mocks cold; stop opening new topics |
| Retake after a near miss | Variable | Moderate | Diagnose the failed domain first; do not re-grind strengths |
A worked seven-day plan for a busy trainee
Assume four clinical days, one study session most evenings and a free weekend morning. Give eMedica one job: breadth and timed pacing.
- Monday: 30 timed eMedica items in your two weakest domains. Log every wrong answer as a one-line misconception.
- Tuesday: read only the explanations for Monday's errors; write the corrected rule in your own words.
- Wednesday: a fresh, unseen block on the same topics in iatroX — never a replay of Monday's items — to test whether the correction transferred. This is your measurement, and it must be on questions you have not seen.
- Thursday: 30 mixed eMedica items across all domains at exam pace.
- Friday: rest, or a ten-minute review of the week's misconception log.
- Saturday: one full eMedica mock, cold and timed; mark it but do not dissect every item.
- Sunday: convert the mock's three biggest error patterns into next week's targets.
No proprietary-algorithm claim is needed here: the discipline is simply learn on one bank, prove it on another. That is the two-Q-bank rule, and it protects your calibration because your transfer score is never inflated by familiarity.
Decision checklist: continue, supplement, switch or stop
- Continue if your unseen first-attempt score is rising and your weak domains are shrinking on a real coverage matrix.
- Supplement if one domain (usually statistics or organisational) stays stubbornly low — add unseen items there rather than re-reading eMedica notes.
- Switch the primary bank only if coverage is genuinely thin for your syllabus, not because a competitor is newer.
- Stop buying more mock papers when you are pacing correctly and your errors are knowledge gaps, not timing failures. More mocks will not fix a knowledge gap.
Every trigger above is measurable. None of them is novelty or sunk cost.
Frequently asked questions
Is eMedica enough for MRCGP AKT on its own? For a well-prepared UK trainee with strong foundations, a single high-quality bank plus the official RCGP materials can be enough to pass, and eMedica's domain-weighted bank and full mocks make it a reasonable sole bank. The caveat is that "enough" is defined by your unseen first-attempt performance, not by finishing the bank. If your transfer score on questions you have never seen is comfortably above the exam standard across all three domains, one bank is enough; if it is not, add unseen volume rather than more re-reads.
Which MRCGP AKT component does eMedica not reproduce well? The weakest fit is usually the interpretive edge of the two 10% domains — applied statistics and current practice administration — because concise explanations tend to state the rule without training the calculation or the reasoning that the exam rewards. eMedica reproduces clinical recognition well; verify the evidence-and-organisational slices against a real coverage matrix and top them up with unseen items if they are thin.
How many eMedica questions should I complete per day for MRCGP AKT? There is no magic number, but a sustainable target for a working trainee is roughly 30–50 timed items on study days, with the emphasis on reviewing every error properly rather than maximising raw volume. Completing 60 items you never revisit is worth less than 30 you convert into corrected, retested rules. Scale up only in the final three to four weeks, and only if your review discipline holds.
When should I stop using eMedica and move to mixed mocks? Move to predominantly mixed, full-length, timed mocks in the final three to four weeks, once your topic-level coverage is broad and your errors are shifting from "did not know" to "misread under time pressure." If you are still discovering whole untouched topics, you are not ready for mock-only revision; keep building coverage first, then transition.
How should I combine eMedica with iatroX without duplicating practice? Give each bank a different job. Use eMedica to learn and drill a topic to a defined standard, then use a free UK-core iatroX block on the same topic to measure transfer on items you have never seen. Never mirror the same questions across both — the point of the second bank is an uncontaminated readiness signal, so your percentage means something. Remember that a Q-bank percentage is not your exam score; the unseen transfer trend is the number to watch.
Editorial notes and references
Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 19 July 2026; question counts, prices and access periods for eMedica are vendor-reported and change frequently, so verify them on the product page before purchase. Disclosure: iatroX operates a competing MRCGP AKT question bank; this audit confines iatroX to the jobs eMedica does not claim — an unseen-transfer measurement layer and a Socratic tutor for misconception work — and does not present it as a replacement for eMedica's mocks. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com.
References: RCGP, Applied Knowledge Test (official format and content guide), rcgp.org.uk/mrcgp-exams/applied-knowledge-test; eMedica MRCGP AKT product pages, emedica.co.uk/aktmock.html and courses.emedica.co.uk; iatroX, "Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score"; iatroX, "The Two-Q-Bank Rule"; iatroX comparison hub.