Every August a new cohort of FY1s downloads thirty medical apps and uses four of them. The problem is not the apps; it is the organising principle. A useful phone is not a library of medical software, it is a toolkit arranged around the jobs you actually do, one reliable tool per job, found in under five seconds with a patient in front of you. Here is that setup, organised the way your day is.
Before the ward round
Three jobs: know your patients, know their results, know their medications. Your patient list and results live in whatever your trust provides, the electronic record, its mobile client if one exists, or the printed list you annotate; learn its quirks in week one because you will spend more time in it than any other system. For medication review, your medicines reference app of choice, kept logged in and current, plus the summary of product characteristics via the emc when you need the manufacturer's detail. None of this is glamorous; all of it is the morning.
During the ward round
The jobs are answering clinical questions fast and calculating safely. For national guidance: the NICE app or site, and CKS for the primary-care-flavoured questions that still arise constantly on wards. For local guidance: your trust's intranet or guidelines app, because local policy beats national elegance every time a consultant asks what our pathway says. For the compressed version with a citation trail, askiatroX answers in natural language with direct links into NICE, CKS, SIGN and SmPC sources, which matters when you have thirty seconds and need to check the threshold, not read the chapter; it is free, and the citation habit it builds is the actual skill. For calculations, a dedicated calculator set you trust, iatroX carries 80+ clinical calculators, or MDCalc; never arithmetic under pressure in your head.
After the ward round
Jobs list, referrals, discharges. The jobs list is the FY1's real operating system: whether you run the classic folded A4, the trust's task module, or a notes app with a system, the requirements are identical, capturable in two seconds, reviewable at a glance, impossible to lose. Referrals and discharge summaries live in trust systems; the phone's contribution is the local directory, switchboard shortcuts, extension lists, the photo of the laminated card by the ward phone that everyone eventually takes.
On call
This is where preparation pays. Before your first shift, load: the trust induction handbook or its app; MicroGuide or whatever carries your local antimicrobial guidance, because empirical prescribing is local law; the escalation pathways and outreach criteria; switchboard and crash numbers where you can find them with shaking hands; and one clinical reference you already trust from daytime use, because 3am is not the moment to learn a new interface. Our full preparation guide is at /blog/fy1-on-call-survival-guide.
Learning
The quiet fifth category that separates surviving from growing. Your e-portfolio, Horus in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Turas in Scotland, captured little and often rather than in November panic. e-LFH for mandated and foundation curriculum modules. iatroX Rounds for the daily habit: a free daily diagnosis case, clues revealed one at a time, name it in as few of your six guesses as you can, streak kept, two minutes of clinical reasoning practice disguised as a game. And a system that turns the week's questions into retained knowledge: the questions you asked askiatroX on Tuesday can become retrieval practice by Friday, with the session logged as evidence through My CPD, which is the difference between a year of lookups and a year of learning; more on that whole approach at /blog/turn-first-year-doctor-into-cpd-portfolio-evidence.
Frequently asked questions
What is the single most important thing on this list?
Local guidance. National sources make you right in general; local pathways make you right here, and the FY1s who thrive are the ones who learned the intranet early.
Do I need to pay for anything as an FY1?
No. Every job above has a free or trust-provided answer, including the free tier of askiatroX; our full free-resources guide is at /blog/best-free-resources-fy1-doctors-uk. Paid tools earn their place later, mostly around exams.
Phone out on the ward round: is that acceptable now?
Looking things up is professional; scrolling is not, and patients cannot tell the difference from the outside. The working etiquette: narrate it, "I'm just checking the guideline", and you have modelled exactly the behaviour good seniors want to see.
How should this setup change between rotations?
The national layer travels untouched; the local layer is rebuilt every rotation, new antimicrobial guide if the trust changes, new pathways, new switchboard, ideally in the week before you move. Diarise it with the rotation date: ten minutes of setup versus a first on call spent searching for the escalation policy is the cheapest trade in medicine.
Where do wellbeing tools fit on the phone?
Quietly and permanently: Practitioner Health's contact details and the BMA's wellbeing line saved now, before any month that needs them, plus whatever keeps you human, music, the group chat, photos of a life outside the hospital. A phone set up only for the job describes a doctor set up only for the job.