This workflow is for higher gastroenterology and hepatology trainees, and for international candidates, preparing the written ESEGH — the European Specialty Examination in Gastroenterology and Hepatology, a two-paper, best-of-five knowledge exam. It uses ESGE and UEG education resources for one job: anchoring your revision to the current European and UK curriculum and guidelines. The principal limitation is blunt. These are a curriculum and e-learning library, not an ESEGH mock-question bank, so their calibration value is authority and currency, not exam-format practice.
That distinction matters because most candidates misuse official-adjacent material in exactly the same way: they read a guideline, feel productive, and never convert it into recall they can retrieve under time pressure. The value of ESGE and UEG content is that it tells you what is examinable and what is current. You destroy that value the moment you treat it as passive review instead of a calibration reference against which you test yourself.
What ESGE/UEG Education Resources offer for ESEGH right now
The table below reflects what we could confirm on the ESGE and UEG education pages on 21 July 2026. Figures and access rules described by a provider are labelled vendor-reported; confirm them yourself before you rely on them, because education platforms revise their catalogues frequently.
| Item | What it is | Practice questions? | Access (vendor-reported) |
|---|---|---|---|
| UEG Gutflix / UEG Education | Curated gastroenterology e-learning: recorded talks, courses, webinars | Not a dedicated ESEGH question set confirmed | Free for UEG associates; some content membership-gated |
| UEG online courses | "Over 40 online courses" with CME credit | Some embedded self-assessment; not an ESEGH mock | Membership-based |
| "Mistakes in…" series | Short expert articles on common errors by topic | No | Free via UEG Education |
| ESGE guidelines and e-learning | Endoscopy guidelines, technique modules, ESGE Days content | No exam-format MCQ bank confirmed | Free guidelines; some events paid |
| UEG Week recordings | Congress sessions, state-of-the-art reviews | No | Free for associates/registrants |
The single most important line in that table is the middle column. As of 21 July 2026 we could not confirm a dedicated ESEGH mock-question bank published by ESGE or UEG. If you find one after this date, verify its size and format before you build a plan around it. Until then, treat these resources as the authoritative content and currency layer, not as a source of the two-paper, timed, best-of-five practice the exam demands.
The ESEGH exam: what you are actually calibrating against
According to the Federation of Royal Colleges of Physicians (thefederation.uk, verified 21 July 2026), ESEGH is delivered as two papers, each three hours long, each containing 100 best-of-five questions — 200 questions in total. Every question offers five options, one correct; one mark is awarded per correct answer and there is no negative marking. Delivery is computer-based, administered by Surpass at a test centre. UK candidates are examined against the JRCPTB Specialty Training Curriculum for Gastroenterology; European candidates against the UEMS "Blue Book" (2017). The 2026 fees were £700 for UK candidates, €800 for ESBGH member countries and £875 for all other countries.
Distinguish the official requirement from third-party framing. The exam body defines the blueprint, the format and the standard. ESGE and UEG produce the content that the blueprint draws on, and commercial banks such as StudyPRN and RevisionPro SCE produce practice questions written to resemble it. The educational content is official-adjacent — UEG is one of the bodies behind the European examination — but a UEG webinar is not a specimen paper, and no third-party bank is the exam. Keep those three categories separate in your head, and the workflow below writes itself.
Inventory your official material honestly
Before you touch a question, list every piece of genuinely official or official-adjacent material you hold and label each one. There are only three honest labels, and most candidates mislabel everything as the first.
| Material | Honest label | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| The published ESEGH/JRCPTB curriculum and Blue Book | Reference (not testable in isolation) | Defines scope; use as the coverage spine |
| Any official Federation sample/specimen questions | Unseen — protect | Your only true official-format calibration; do not burn early |
| UEG courses/webinars you have already watched | Attempted once / contaminated by review | Content is now familiar; re-watching feels like learning but is recognition |
| ESGE guidelines you have read | Contaminated by review | You recognise the recommendation; you may not be able to retrieve it cold |
| Commercial mock papers already sat | Attempted once | Useful for error analysis, useless as a fresh calibration |
The reason to label ruthlessly is that a calibration is only meaningful on material you have never seen. The first time you sit the official Federation sample under exam conditions, you get a clean read on your true position. The second time, you are measuring memory of that paper, not your gastroenterology. Because the official set is finite and small, its calibration value is a consumable resource. Spend it once, deliberately, and protect it until then.
Choose your calibration date
Pick the date on which you will sit your one clean official-format calibration. It must be late enough to be meaningful — you should have completed at least one full pass of the curriculum spine and a few thousand practice questions — and early enough that you can still act on what it reveals. For most trainees revising around clinical work, that means roughly four to six weeks before the exam.
Set it too early and you will "fail" domains you simply have not reached yet, learn nothing, and have wasted your only unseen official paper. Set it too late and you will discover a hepatology blind spot with five days to close it. Put the date in your diary now and treat the official material between now and then as untouchable.
Reproduce exam conditions exactly
On the calibration day, replicate the real thing. Two hundred best-of-five questions is a three-hour-per-paper endurance task; a guideline read at your desk with coffee tells you nothing about how you perform in hour three. Reproduce the conditions that matter:
- Timing. Three hours per paper, roughly 1.8 minutes per question, no pausing to look things up.
- Allowed references. None. ESEGH is closed-book; if you check a guideline mid-question you have measured your library, not your recall.
- Breaks. Model the real interval between papers; do not stitch the two halves together in one comfortable morning.
- Response format. Single best answer, committed and not revisited endlessly. Record a confidence flag against each answer so you can separate knowledge gaps from guesses later.
The point is not theatre. It is that the exam tests retrieval under fatigue and time pressure, and the only honest calibration is one taken under those same constraints.
Code every error by domain, process and format
After the sitting, resist the urge to add up a percentage and move on. Your overall score is the least useful number you will generate that day — a point argued in full in Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score. Instead, code every error on three axes:
- Domain — luminal GI, hepatology, pancreaticobiliary, nutrition, endoscopy, or the general and acute medicine that ESEGH still expects.
- Cognitive process — did you lack the fact, misread the stem, know the fact but misapply it, or fail to prioritise between two plausible options?
- Format — was it a text-only recall item, an endoscopy image, a liver-function or biopsy data set, or a guideline-threshold question where European and UK practice diverge?
A candidate who is "62% overall" might be 80% on text recall and 35% on image-and-data interpretation. Those two candidates need completely different next weeks, and only three-axis coding tells them apart. This is the same coverage discipline set out in question-bank completion is not coverage.
Map each error to fresh practice — keep official material clean
Now convert the calibration into action without contaminating your official set. For every coded error, write one specific learning objective ("stratify variceal bleeding prophylaxis by Child-Pugh and current guidance"), read the relevant UEG or ESGE content once to fix the concept, then test it on a genuinely fresh third-party question you have never seen. The official material stays out of daily repetition. Your daily churn runs on transfer questions — items that test the same concept in a new stem — so that improvement reflects understanding, not memory of a specific paper.
This is where a general unseen bank earns its place. iatroX is not a specialty-specific ESEGH bank, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise; it is a UK and MRCP-level knowledge and unseen-MCQ layer with spaced retrieval. For ESEGH it does one useful job well: it supplies unseen items across the general and acute medicine, pharmacology and core-medicine territory that the ESEGH blueprint still assumes, and it measures whether a concept you "fixed" from a guideline actually transfers to a new stem. Pair it with a genuine specialty bank such as StudyPRN or RevisionPro SCE for the gastroenterology- and hepatology-specific depth, and use the iatroX comparison hub to decide which specialty bank fits your gaps.
Repeat only with genuinely unseen material
If you calibrate again, do it only on material you have never sat: a newly released official sample, a fresh mock, or a block of transfer questions held back for the purpose. Repeating a paper you have already seen produces a flattering number and a false sense of readiness. If no unseen official material remains — and for ESEGH it will run out quickly — switch entirely to unseen transfer blocks and stop pretending the second sitting of an old paper is a calibration. It is revision, and useful, but it is not a measurement.
A seven-day plan for trainees revising around clinical work
The plan below assumes a working week on the wards with an hour on weekdays and longer at the weekend. It uses ESGE/UEG content for one job — fixing concepts to the current guideline — and a bank for unseen transfer practice. No proprietary-algorithm claims are made or needed; the mechanism is ordinary spaced retrieval.
| Day | Official/ESGE-UEG job | Bank job (unseen transfer) | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon | Read one "Mistakes in…" article on your weakest domain | 20 unseen items on that domain | Concept notes + coded errors |
| Tue | Watch one focused UEG course segment on liver data | 20 unseen items, mixed | Retrieval attempt before watching |
| Wed | Review one ESGE endoscopy guideline threshold | 15 image/data items | Threshold flashcards |
| Thu | No new reading — space Monday's misses | 20 items repeating Mon/Tue concepts in new stems | Transfer check |
| Fri | One guideline-difference note (European vs UK) | 20 unseen items, timed | Speed under fatigue |
| Sat | Longer session: one full curriculum sub-domain | 40 unseen items, timed block | Weekly coverage update |
| Sun | Rest or light review of the week's flagged errors | Optional 20-item confidence check | Plan next week's weakest domain |
The discipline is that guideline reading always precedes or follows a retrieval attempt on the same concept. Reading alone is the trap; reading bracketed by testing is calibration you can bank.
Continue, supplement, switch or stop
Use measurable gaps, not novelty or sunk cost, to decide your next move:
- Continue with your current mix if your unseen transfer accuracy is rising and your three-axis coding shows shrinking domain gaps.
- Supplement with a dedicated specialty bank if your coded errors cluster in gastroenterology- or hepatology-specific depth that general material cannot reach.
- Switch your primary bank only if a stratified sample of its questions is out of date against current guidance, or if you have effectively memorised it.
- Stop doing new questions in a domain once your unseen accuracy there is stable and high, and redirect that time to your weakest domain instead.
The bottom line
ESGE and UEG education resources are a strong, authoritative content and currency layer for ESEGH, and they are worth including in the revision stack for exactly that reason. They are not a mock-question bank, and their calibration value collapses if you treat guideline reading as the endpoint. Use the finite official material once, under exam conditions, protect it fiercely, code your errors on three axes, and run your daily practice on unseen transfer questions. Do that and ESGE/UEG content does the one job it is genuinely best at: keeping your knowledge current and correctly scoped while a bank measures whether that knowledge transfers.
Frequently asked questions
Is ESGE/UEG Education Resources enough for ESEGH on its own? No. As of 21 July 2026 we could not confirm that ESGE or UEG publishes a dedicated ESEGH mock-question bank, and even their richest e-learning is content rather than timed best-of-five practice. They are excellent for anchoring scope and currency, but ESEGH is a 200-question, no-negative-marking endurance exam, and passing it requires large volumes of unseen, timed practice that this library does not supply. Treat ESGE/UEG as one layer, not the whole plan.
Which ESEGH component does ESGE/UEG Education Resources not reproduce well? It does not reproduce the exam interface or the timed, closed-book, best-of-five format, and it is not built to drill endoscopy-image or liver-data interpretation under time pressure. Its recorded talks and guidelines explain concepts richly, but they do not force the single-best-answer commitment against the clock that the two three-hour papers demand. For that, you need a question bank and, ideally, image-and-data practice.
How many ESGE/UEG questions should I complete per day for ESEGH? The question is slightly misframed, because ESGE/UEG is not primarily a per-day question product. A more useful target is to fix one to three concepts per day from ESGE/UEG content and immediately test each on unseen transfer questions from a bank — realistically 20 to 40 unseen items daily around clinical work. The number that matters is unseen items attempted and coded, not minutes of video watched.
When should I stop using ESGE/UEG Education Resources and move to mixed mocks? Keep ESGE/UEG in the mix throughout for currency, but shift your centre of gravity to full mixed, timed mocks in the final three to four weeks. Once your single-domain accuracy is stable, the binding constraint becomes stamina, pacing and switching between domains — none of which a curated video library trains. At that point, a weekly full-length mock plus targeted ESGE/UEG reading on the misses is the right balance.
How should I combine ESGE/UEG Education Resources with iatroX without duplicating practice? Give each a distinct job. ESGE/UEG fixes and updates the concept; iatroX supplies unseen items that test whether the concept transfers to a new stem and measures your recall over time with spaced retrieval. Because iatroX is a general UK/MRCP-level knowledge and unseen-MCQ layer rather than a specialty ESEGH bank, you will not duplicate ESGE/UEG's specialty content — you will convert it into retrieval. Pair both with a dedicated specialty bank for gastroenterology- and hepatology-specific depth.
Editorial notes and references
Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 21 July 2026. Figures attributed to ESGE, UEG, StudyPRN, RevisionPro SCE or any other provider are vendor-reported and were correct to the best of our checking on that date; education catalogues, prices and access rules change often, so verify current details on the provider's own page before relying on them. Disclosure: iatroX operates a competing question bank; in this article its role is confined to the unseen-transfer and measurement job that ESGE/UEG education resources do not claim to perform, and it is not presented as a specialty-specific ESEGH bank. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com.
References: the Federation of Royal Colleges of Physicians ESEGH page (thefederation.uk/examinations/specialty-certificate-examinations/european-specialty-examination-gastroenterology); UEG Education (ueg.eu/education); ESGE guidelines and e-learning (esge.com); the ESEGH content-gap checklist; Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score.