The GPhC Common Registration Assessment Q-Bank Content-Gap Checklist: What to Verify Before You Stop Doing New Questions

You have covered the GPhC Common Registration Assessment when you can produce evidence across both papers, not when a question bank tells you it is finished. This checklist is for provisionally registered pharmacists in the final weeks before a sitting who want a defensible answer to a single question: is anything left that self-selected practice has been quietly hiding? The minimum evidence is coverage of every framework area, first-attempt accuracy on unseen items, a current read on guidance-sensitive law and therapeutics, and calculation speed under the free-entry format — never a completion percentage.

What "covered" actually means for this exam

"Covered" is an evidential claim, not an activity log. Finishing a bank tells you that you have seen the items in that bank; it says nothing about the domains the bank under-samples, the topics you avoided because they felt uncomfortable, or the guidance that has moved since the questions were written. Because the Common Registration Assessment must be passed in both parts at the same sitting, with no compensation between them, a candidate who is fluent in Part 2 therapeutics but slow and error-prone on Part 1 calculations is not "covered" in any meaningful sense — one weak component sinks the whole sitting. The checklist below is designed to convert a vague feeling of readiness into a set of tick-boxes you can either satisfy or fail honestly.

The current exam snapshot

Anchor your audit to the current GPhC assessment framework and the official example questions, which are the only authoritative statements of format and standard. Verify these details on pharmacyregulation.org before you rely on them; the structure below reflects the framework for 2026 sittings.

Component	What it tests	Format	Time
Part 1 — Pharmacy and healthcare calculations	40 calculation questions	Numerical free-entry (no options to choose from)	120 minutes (~3 min/item)
Part 2 — Safe and effective pharmacy care	120 questions	90 single best answer (five options) + 30 extended matching items (15 EMQ sets of two)	150 minutes

Both papers carry one mark per correct answer with no penalty for a wrong or unanswered item, and you must reach the pass standard in each part in the same sitting; there are a maximum of three attempts. The framework organises Part 2 around two overarching domains — person-centred care and collaboration, and professional practice — assessed through three content areas: clinical therapeutics (grouped into fifteen therapeutic areas), law, governance and regulation, and the pharmacy and healthcare calculations that dominate Part 1. The GPhC does not publish a fixed number of questions per therapeutic area, so treat any per-domain weighting as indicative and confirm it against the framework rather than a revision provider's summary.

The single most important structural fact for your revision is that Part 1 is not multiple choice. A pure MCQ bank cannot rehearse the free-entry answer format, where there is no distractor to jog your memory and a transcription slip or a units error scores zero. That is the first content gap most candidates never measure.

Build a blueprint coverage table

Completion is not coverage. The honest way to see your real position is a coverage table that forces you to record what you have actually done in each framework area rather than trusting an overall bar. Build the table below in a spreadsheet and fill one row per area; the discipline is in the columns, not the totals. This mirrors the completion-is-not-coverage method applied to pharmacy registration.

Framework area	Official weight (verify on framework)	Questions attempted	First-attempt accuracy	Last reviewed	Confidence (1–5)
Part 1 — calculations (all types)	Large; whole paper
Clinical therapeutics — cardiovascular	Part of 15 areas
Clinical therapeutics — infection	Part of 15 areas
Clinical therapeutics — CNS / mental health	Part of 15 areas
Clinical therapeutics — endocrine (incl. diabetes)	Part of 15 areas
Clinical therapeutics — respiratory	Part of 15 areas
Other therapeutic areas (GI, MSK, skin, eye, renal, etc.)	Part of 15 areas
Law, governance and regulation	One content area
Person-centred care and collaboration	Cross-cutting domain

The column that exposes hidden gaps is first-attempt accuracy, because it is the only figure a re-drilled bank cannot inflate. If a therapeutic area shows high overall accuracy but you cannot remember when you last met it cold, mark the confidence low and treat it as un-covered until an unseen block says otherwise.

Ten domain-level blind spots self-selected practice hides

These are the areas most likely to remain invisible if you practise only what you enjoy. Each should be reviewed against primary sources and, where the answer is judgement rather than fact, checked with an experienced pharmacist or your educational supervisor before you call it done.

Controlled drugs — legal classes and schedules, prescription requirements, safe custody, the register, destruction and denaturing, and Schedule 2–3 supply rules. High-stakes, heavily tested, and easy to half-learn.
Calculation edge cases — displacement values, moles and millimoles, parts-per-million, percentage and ratio strengths, and dilution problems that candidates who are comfortable with straightforward dosing tend to skip.
Renal and hepatic dose adjustment — estimating renal function (Cockcroft–Gault versus reported eGFR) and knowing which drugs need adjustment or avoidance; a classic source of confident wrong answers.
Pregnancy and breastfeeding — teratogenic risk, pregnancy-prevention programmes for high-risk medicines, and safe choices in lactation.
High-risk medicines monitoring — lithium, methotrexate, disease-modifying drugs, amiodarone, anticoagulants and other therapeutic-drug-monitoring staples, including required baseline and ongoing tests.
Interactions and contraindications — clinically significant interactions (for example with methotrexate, lithium, warfarin and the direct oral anticoagulants) rather than long automated lists.
Responding to symptoms and over-the-counter supply — referral red flags, differential reasoning and the limits of self-care.
Safeguarding, consent and capacity — children (Gillick competence and the Fraser criteria), adults lacking capacity, confidentiality and information-sharing.
Professional standards and fitness to practise — the GPhC standards for pharmacy professionals, raising concerns, duty of candour and error disclosure.
Governance around supply — emergency supply, unlicensed and off-label use, "specials", error reporting and near-miss learning.

For every medicines fact in this list, work from the summary of product characteristics (SmPC) via the electronic medicines compendium (eMC), NICE and its Clinical Knowledge Summaries (CKS), and the Medicines, Ethics and Practice (MEP) guide for the professional and legal framing — not a revision provider's paraphrase.

Format checklist: calculation workflow, legal/ethical updates and medicines optimisation

Three things in this exam behave differently from ordinary recall, and each needs deliberate practice rather than passive reading.

Calculation workflow. Because Part 1 is free-entry, rehearse the whole workflow: read, set up, convert units, compute, sense-check the order of magnitude, and enter cleanly. Practise each calculation type in isolation first, then in mixed timed sets at roughly three minutes an item, and log the type of every error (set-up, conversion, arithmetic, transcription) so you attack the cause, not the symptom.
Legal and ethical currency. Law and standards are not static facts; they are a moving target. Verify that your understanding of controlled-drug rules, safeguarding thresholds and professional standards reflects the current MEP and GPhC guidance, not last year's notes.
Medicines optimisation. The exam rewards patient-centred reasoning — deprescribing, polypharmacy review, adherence and shared decision-making — not just "which drug." Practise choosing and justifying, then defend the rejected options, because that is the reasoning an SBA distractor set is built to probe.

Interpretation checklist

Pharmacy is a data-interpretation profession, so check that you can read the inputs the questions supply, not just recall facts. For the Common Registration Assessment the relevant items are: laboratory trends (renal and liver function, potassium, INR and therapeutic-drug-monitoring levels), calculation data (weights, concentrations, infusion and flow rates), and clinical numbers that drive a dose decision. ECGs and radiographs are far less central to this exam than to a hospital-medicine paper, so do not over-invest there; a QTc-prolongation concept or a monitoring rationale is more representative than plate-reading. The test is simple: given a set of results and a scenario, can you make the correct supply, adjust or refer decision under time?

Recency checklist

Some topics are guidance-sensitive and go stale between question-writing and exam day. For each of these, record the date and the jurisdiction of the source you learned it from, and re-verify anything older than your last guideline cycle:

national drug-safety alerts and pregnancy-prevention requirements for high-risk medicines;
NICE and CKS updates in high-yield areas such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, anticoagulation and asthma/COPD;
the current MEP edition and any change to controlled-drug or supply legislation;
GPhC standards and any published fitness-to-practise or professional-guidance changes.

Jurisdiction matters even within Great Britain: some prescribing and supply arrangements differ, and NHS service specifications are not identical across nations. Note which country's rules a fact belongs to.

Performance checklist

Coverage is necessary but not sufficient; you also need evidence that the knowledge holds up under exam conditions. Confirm all five:

Unseen, timed, mixed blocks. Your headline number should come from questions you have never met, mixed across areas, at exam pace — not from a bank you have drilled.
Speed. Around three minutes per calculation and about a minute per SBA (a little more for EMQs); a correct answer you cannot reach in time is a wrong answer on the day.
High-confidence errors. Track the items you were sure about and still got wrong — these are the dangerous gaps, because you will not revise what you believe you know.
Retention. Re-test earlier material after a gap; if last month's therapeutics has decayed, you have not covered it, you have visited it.
Official-material calibration. Sit the GPhC official example questions late, under timed conditions, as the gold-standard check on standard and style. And remember that your Q-bank percentage is not your exam score.

The stop-or-continue decision tree

When your coverage table and performance data are in front of you, the decision is mechanical, not emotional. Base it on the measured gap, never on how many days you have already put in.

Continue new questions where an area shows low first-attempt accuracy or thin volume — you have a knowledge gap, and fresh items are the right tool.
Consolidate where accuracy is high but retention is slipping — stop adding new material and space your reviews instead.
Simulate where individual areas are solid but you have never assembled a full, timed, two-part sitting — the gap is stamina and pacing, not knowledge.
Seek teaching where you keep making the same reasoning error despite review — a supervisor or tutor closes a gap that solo drilling cannot.
Rest where performance is plateauing and fatigue is rising — a tired candidate makes calculation slips, and recovery is a legitimate revision activity.

A one-page checklist you can copy

Copy this into your notes and tick honestly. You are covered only when every line is satisfied on unseen, timed material.

A worked example

The figures here are illustrative and invented; use them as a model for reading your own table, not as a benchmark. "Priya" is five weeks out. Her overall bank percentage is 78% and she feels broadly ready. Her coverage table tells a different story: cardiovascular and infection therapeutics sit at 82–85% first-attempt accuracy and were reviewed last week, but Part 1 calculations show 61% first-attempt accuracy with a cluster of conversion and displacement errors, and controlled-drug law was "last reviewed" six weeks ago at 68%. Her decision is not "keep grinding the whole bank." It is to continue new questions in calculations and controlled drugs, consolidate cardiovascular and infection with spaced reviews only, and simulate a full two-part timed sitting in week four to test pacing. No pass prediction is possible or wise from these numbers — the point is that a single headline percentage concealed the two components most likely to fail her, and the table surfaced them.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know whether I have covered the full GPhC Common Registration Assessment blueprint? You know when a coverage table — not a completion bar — shows adequate first-attempt accuracy across every framework area on unseen items, with a recent "last reviewed" date against each. The framework's content areas (clinical therapeutics across its therapeutic areas, law, governance and regulation, and calculations) are your row list; the domains of person-centred care and professional practice cut across them. Because the GPhC does not publish exact per-area question counts, treat the blueprint as a checklist of areas you must be able to perform in, and calibrate the standard against the official example questions rather than any provider's claim about weighting.

Can one question bank be enough for GPhC Common Registration Assessment? One well-mapped bank can be your backbone, but relying on a single bank creates a blind spot the bank cannot see: once you have worked through it, your score reflects familiarity with those specific items rather than transfer to unseen ones. The sensible model is the two-Q-bank rule — a primary bank for volume and a second, unseen bank kept purely for measurement — plus the GPhC official example questions as the calibration standard. For Part 1 specifically, make sure at least one of your resources rehearses the free-entry answer format, because an MCQ-only bank never trains it.

What should I measure instead of my overall Q-bank percentage for GPhC Common Registration Assessment? Measure first-attempt accuracy on unseen items, broken down by framework area; calculation speed and error type in the free-entry format; retention of material after a gap; and your high-confidence error rate. An aggregate percentage on a re-drilled bank is the least informative number you own, because it blends areas you have mastered with areas you have merely revisited and hides the components — often calculations and law — most likely to end a sitting. Component-level, unseen, timed data is the honest signal.

When should I stop doing new GPhC Common Registration Assessment questions? Stop adding new questions in an area when its first-attempt accuracy on unseen items is comfortably above your target and stable across a retention gap; at that point new items add little and your effort is better spent consolidating or simulating. Keep doing new questions where accuracy is low or volume is thin. In the final week, most candidates should shift the balance from new material towards full, timed, two-part simulations and the official example questions, reserving new questions only to patch a confirmed gap.

Which GPhC Common Registration Assessment resource should I use for my weakest component? Match the resource to the failure mode. If calculations are weak, use a bank with a genuine free-entry calculation engine and drill by type, then mix; the iatroX GPhC bank is built around that free-entry format and a Socratic tutor that explains the misconception rather than just marking the answer. If law and ethics are weak, work from the current MEP and GPhC standards and discuss ambiguous scenarios with a supervisor, because judgement is not learned from a distractor set alone. If therapeutics are weak, anchor to NICE/CKS and the SmPC/eMC. You can compare options on the iatroX comparison hub.

Editorial notes and references

Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 20 July 2026. Exam format is taken from the GPhC Common Registration Assessment framework and example-questions materials for 2026 sittings; confirm current details on pharmacyregulation.org, as counts and rules can change between sittings. Any figures attributed to iatroX (for example bank size) are vendor-reported and not independently audited — verify the current count on the product page. Disclosure: iatroX operates a GPhC Common Registration Assessment question bank and therefore competes with other pharmacy banks; this article confines iatroX's role to the unseen-measurement and free-entry-calculation jobs a single primary resource cannot do for itself, and it does not replace supervised placement practice, the current MEP, or your educational supervisor's judgement on professional standards. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com. References: the GPhC assessment framework and official example questions (pharmacyregulation.org); NICE and CKS, the SmPC via the eMC, and the Medicines, Ethics and Practice guide for content; and, on iatroX, the GPhC bank, the comparison hub, the completion-is-not-coverage and two-Q-bank pillars, and "Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score."

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