This audit is for ST4-and-above acute internal medicine trainees weighing Licence Medical as a question bank for the written SCE Acute Medicine. It addresses the knowledge-recall component — the two-paper, best-of-five exam — and shows how to test any bank against the official 13-domain blueprint rather than a headline total. The principal limitation to flag up front is that Licence Medical is a smaller independent provider whose live question count, price and per-domain split are not independently confirmed at the last-checked date, so parts of this audit are a method for you to run, not numbers to take on trust.
What Licence Medical offers for SCE Acute Medicine right now
| Field | Detail (last checked 21 July 2026) |
|---|---|
| Provider | Licence Medical (license-medical.com), an independent SCE preparation provider |
| Specialties offered | ESENeph, Gastroenterology (European Board), Rheumatology, Endocrinology & Diabetes, Acute Medicine, Respiratory Medicine, Medical Oncology, Palliative Medicine, Neurology, and MRCP Part 1 and 2 — Acute Medicine SCE is confirmed |
| Live question count | Not independently confirmed at the last-checked date — verify on license-medical.com |
| Mock exam | Advertised across the range; format and count not independently confirmed — verify |
| AI / adaptive features | None advertised — verify |
| Price / access | Not independently confirmed; payment via Stripe or PayPal — verify current price and access period on the product page |
| Comparators (vendor-reported) | StudyPRN SCE Acute Medicine: 697 MCQs, one 3-hour 100-question mock, from £199 for 12 months; BMJ OnExamination lists an SCE in Acute Medicine bank |
The honest reading is that Licence Medical is a genuine, focused SCE provider that does cover Acute Medicine, but it publishes less independently verifiable detail than the larger specialists. That is not disqualifying — small banks can be well written — but it changes how you audit it: you cannot lean on a published per-domain breakdown, so you have to build one yourself from the questions you can see, starting with the free samples. Never accept a headline total as coverage; a bank can advertise a large number and still be lopsided. For the general principle, see question-bank completion is not coverage.
It helps to place Licence Medical in its market. For SCE Acute Medicine the better-known specialists are StudyPRN and BMJ OnExamination, both of which publish dedicated banks with timed mocks (vendor-reported), while Pastest and others cover parts of the MRCP and SCE range. A smaller independent provider can still be a sensible choice — sometimes a keener price, sometimes a particular author's clarity — but the trade is usually less published detail and a smaller image library, which is why the audit below leans on what you can verify yourself rather than on the marketing.
The exam you are actually sitting
The SCE in Acute Medicine is the standard Specialty Certificate Examination format: two papers of 100 best-of-five questions — 200 in total — each three hours, one day, computer-based on Surpass, one mark per correct answer, no negative marking. Only the blueprint changes between specialties. The indicative Acute Medicine distribution is below.
| Blueprint domain | Indicative questions (of 200) |
|---|---|
| Cardiovascular medicine | 20 |
| Gastroenterology and hepatology | 20 |
| Neurology and ophthalmology | 20 |
| Respiratory medicine | 20 |
| Medicine in the elderly | 18 |
| Diabetes and endocrine medicine | 14 |
| Infectious diseases | 14 |
| Musculoskeletal system | 12 |
| Cancer and palliative care, haematology | 10 |
| Clinical pharmacology and poisoning | 10 |
| Critical care medicine | 10 |
| Renal medicine | 10 |
| Other (allergy, genetics, dermatology, immunology, patient safety, psychiatry, public health) | 22 |
Record the live count and break it down by domain
The headline question total is the least informative figure a bank publishes. Build the audit table instead. Take the bank's own topic tags, map them onto the 13 official domains above, and record the number of questions the bank offers in each. Then compare that column against the blueprint target column. A bank that is rich in cardiology and respiratory but thin in elderly medicine, endocrine and the "other" long tail will feel productive while leaving a fifth of the paper under-practised. Because Licence Medical does not publish a per-domain split, this is a manual job: work the free samples and the first tranche of questions, tally by domain, and extrapolate. If you cannot confirm the live total, record "verify on product page" in the count column rather than inventing a number.
Sample the question style
Coverage is only half the audit; cognitive level is the other half. Sample a stratified set and grade each item on five axes: recall versus application (does it ask you to know a fact or to choose the safest next step); stem length and realism; option plausibility (are the four distractors genuinely tempting, or padding); presence of image or data interpretation; and management sequencing (does it test what you do first, not merely what is true). A bank that skews to single-fact recall inflates confidence but under-prepares you for the SCE's application-heavy, "best-of-five" judgement items, where two options are defensible and one is safest.
Jurisdiction and recency
Acute medicine is guidance-sensitive. Check a stratified sample against current UK sources — NICE, SIGN, CKS, the relevant SmPC or eMC entry for drug facts, and Resuscitation Council UK material for peri-arrest content — and record the date you reviewed it. Watch for items that quietly rest on superseded thresholds (for example, sepsis screening, DKA management, or anticoagulation choices), and for any content written to a non-UK guideline. A single out-of-date stem is not fatal, but a pattern of them means the bank is not being maintained, which should weigh against it as a primary resource.
The format gap
State this plainly: a standard best-of-five bank, Licence Medical or any other, cannot train the parts of acute medicine that live outside single-answer recognition. It will not test your ability to prioritise several deteriorating patients at once, to integrate a trend of observations and blood results over hours, or to apply UK guidance dynamically at the bedside. The SCE itself is an MCQ exam and cannot assess those either — but your job depends on them, and some SCE items probe them indirectly. That gap is the subject of the exam-level hub, What MCQ Banks Cannot Prepare You for in SCE Acute Medicine; read it alongside this audit so you do not mistake a high bank percentage for readiness to run the take.
Duplication and contamination
In a smaller bank, watch for repeated concepts and near-duplicate stems. If the same three hyponatraemia scenarios recur with cosmetic changes, your rising accuracy may be recognition of a specific item rather than mastery of the concept. The tell is a score that climbs on the bank but stalls on unseen questions elsewhere. This is why bank completion is a milestone, not a finish line: 100% of a bank means you have seen every item once, not that you have covered the blueprint.
Reading your audit: three signals that should change your plan
Three findings from the audit should change what you do next. If your per-domain tally is uneven — plenty of cardiology and respiratory, little elderly medicine, endocrine or the long tail — keep the bank if you like it but plan deliberate practice for the thin domains, because they are a fifth of the paper. If the question style skews to single-fact recall rather than best-of-five judgement, treat the bank as foundation-building and layer harder application practice on top. And if a stratified sample is out of step with current UK guidance, downgrade the bank from primary to supplement, since stale content produces confident, avoidable errors. None of these is visible in the headline total; all of them come out of the sampling work.
Best-fit matrix
Where does Licence Medical sit in a revision stack? Decide from the audit, not the marketing.
| Use case | Good fit? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation building | Possibly | If explanations are strong and referenced; verify depth from samples |
| First-pass primary bank | Conditional | Only if per-domain coverage is even and the count is adequate — verify |
| Second bank for extra volume | Yes | A focused independent bank can add unseen questions in weak domains |
| Retake resource | Conditional | Useful if it covers domains your previous bank neglected |
| Final full-length simulation | No | Verify the mock is genuinely 100 items in exam conditions before relying on it |
A seven-day plan for a busy trainee
Take Daniel, an ST4 doing a first pass around a full acute rota. He uses Licence Medical for one defined job — systematic first-pass coverage of two blueprint domains a week — and iatroX for adaptive transfer practice, with no claim to a proprietary algorithm; iatroX simply serves unseen, mixed-topic, timed blocks and re-surfaces misses on a spaced schedule.
- Day 1: Licence Medical, 30 questions in one weak domain (say endocrine), full explanations read and notes made.
- Day 2: iatroX 20-item unseen mixed block, timed. Compare which endocrine concepts transfer.
- Day 3 (on call): One guideline summary relevant to a Day 1 error; no formal questions.
- Day 4: Licence Medical, 30 questions in a second domain (renal).
- Day 5: iatroX 30-item mixed block including renal and endocrine among distractors; code errors.
- Day 6: Review Licence Medical explanations only for items missed; no new questions.
- Day 7: iatroX spaced re-test of the week's misses, blind.
The division of labour matters: the bank drives structured coverage, and the unseen layer checks whether that coverage has become transferable knowledge rather than item familiarity.
Run that loop for a few weeks and the audit stops being a one-off judgement and becomes a live signal: if your unseen accuracy tracks your bank accuracy, the bank is teaching transferable knowledge; if it lags, you are learning the bank rather than the blueprint, and it is time to add unseen breadth.
Decision checklist: continue, supplement, switch or stop
- Continue if per-domain coverage is even, explanations are UK-referenced and your unseen accuracy tracks your bank accuracy.
- Supplement with a second bank (StudyPRN or BMJ OnExamination for SCE Acute Medicine, vendor-reported) if Licence Medical runs thin in a high-weight domain.
- Switch primary bank if a stratified sample is out of date or lopsided against the blueprint.
- Stop doing new questions when coverage is complete and high-confidence errors are near zero; consolidate instead.
Frequently asked questions
Is Licence Medical enough for SCE Acute Medicine on its own? It can serve as a primary bank only if your own audit confirms even coverage across the 13 domains and an adequate, up-to-date question volume — and because the live count and per-domain split are not independently confirmed at the last-checked date, you should verify that on license-medical.com before committing. For most candidates a single independent bank is best paired with a second unseen source so that breadth and pacing are properly stressed.
Which SCE Acute Medicine component does Licence Medical not reproduce well? Like any best-of-five bank, it does not reproduce dynamic prioritisation of multiple deteriorating patients or the integration of trending data over time, and you should verify whether its mock is a genuine full-length timed paper before relying on it for simulation. Its strongest contribution is structured knowledge coverage, not performance under real-time acute pressure.
How many Licence Medical questions should I complete per day for SCE Acute Medicine? A sustainable working-trainee target is roughly 30 to 50 questions a day, every one reviewed and coded by domain and error type, rather than a larger number rushed without analysis. Quality of review, not raw throughput, is what moves your unseen accuracy — and unseen accuracy, not bank percentage, is the number that predicts exam readiness.
When should I stop using Licence Medical and move to mixed mocks? Once you have completed a first pass and your per-domain coverage is even, shift the final three to four weeks toward mixed, timed, full-length mocks. If Licence Medical's mock is not a verified 100-item exam-condition paper, use a bank that offers one, or assemble the equivalent from unseen blocks, so your pacing is tested realistically before the day.
How should I combine Licence Medical with iatroX without duplicating practice? Assign each a single job: Licence Medical is your structured coverage bank, and iatroX is your unseen measurement and spaced-retrieval layer for cross-specialty internal-medicine knowledge. Because iatroX is not a specialty-specific SCE bank, it will not re-serve Licence Medical's items; it provides fresh mixed-topic timed blocks and re-surfaces your coded misses, which keeps your measuring instrument clean of the questions you have already worked.
Editorial notes and references
Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 21 July 2026. Vendor-reported figures (Licence Medical, StudyPRN, BMJ OnExamination) are labelled as such; several Licence Medical specifics could not be independently confirmed at the last-checked date and should be verified on license-medical.com. Disclosure: iatroX operates a competing UK question bank; in this audit its role is confined to unseen cross-specialty measurement and spaced retrieval, and it is not a specialty-specific SCE Acute Medicine bank. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com. References: the Federation SCE Acute Medicine page; license-medical.com; the iatroX comparison hub; Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score; and the exam-level hub linked above.