This schedule is for pre-hospital and emergency clinicians who have attended an ATACC course, or who use ATACC trauma and critical-care material, and want to convert it into retrievable knowledge for the DipIMC Part A written paper. Begin with the honest finding: ATACC is a trauma and critical-care training brand with its own diploma and fellowship. It is not an RCSEd DipIMC question bank, it is not blueprinted to the pre-hospital curriculum, and it does nothing to reproduce the Part B OSPE.
Start with the finding: ATACC is a trauma brand, not a DipIMC bank
If you searched for an "ATACC Resources DipIMC question bank", the most useful thing this article can do is save you a wrong turn. ATACC Group is a trauma and critical-care training organisation and an accredited Royal College of Surgeons of England Surgical Education Centre. It runs the ATACC course and awards its own qualifications — the Diploma in Anaesthesia, Trauma & Critical Care (DipATACC) and the Fellowship in Trauma & Critical Care (FFTACC) — through its own faculty, assessed by dissertation, presentation and viva. Those are respected awards, but they are separate from the RCSEd Diploma in Immediate Medical Care. As of 21 July 2026 we could find no ATACC online question bank aligned to the DipIMC.
That distinction changes how you should use ATACC material. First, ATACC content is not mapped to the RCSEd Faculty of Pre-Hospital Care (FPHC) pre-hospital emergency medicine (PHEM) curriculum that DipIMC is blueprinted against, so working through it will not tell you whether you have covered the DipIMC syllabus. Second, high-fidelity trauma teaching is a narrow proxy for a diploma that also examines medical, cardiac, paediatric, obstetric, environmental, toxicological and medico-legal pre-hospital practice. ATACC can still be a strong knowledge input for the trauma-heavy portion of Part A — but only if you treat it as raw material to be converted into active recall, not as a revision bank in itself. That conversion is the whole point of the loop below.
What ATACC offers for DipIMC right now
| Attribute | Detail (last checked 21 July 2026) |
|---|---|
| Product type | Trauma & critical-care training brand (ATACC Group); accredited RCS of England Surgical Education Centre |
| DipIMC question bank | None found — ATACC does not appear to publish an RCSEd DipIMC question bank |
| Own qualifications | DipATACC and FFTACC — separate awards with their own assessment, not the RCSEd DipIMC |
| AI / adaptive features | Not applicable (no DipIMC bank identified) |
| Price / access | Course and membership pricing is vendor-reported — verify current figures on ataccgroup.com |
| DipIMC components covered | None directly; trauma/critical-care knowledge overlaps DipIMC Part A content but is not blueprinted to the PHEM curriculum and does not reproduce the OSPE |
Figures and scope above are vendor-reported or drawn from the public ATACC pages on the date shown; confirm anything load-bearing before you rely on it.
Exam anchor: what DipIMC actually tests
The Diploma in Immediate Medical Care is awarded by the RCSEd Faculty of Pre-Hospital Care and has two components you must pass:
- Part A (written): 180 single-best-answer (SBA) questions in 180 minutes — one minute per item.
- Part B (OSPE): an objective structured practical examination of 14 stations — twelve 8-minute stations and two 16-minute stations — plus rest/preparation stations.
The written paper is blueprinted against the UK PHEM curriculum and pitched around Skills for Health Career Framework Level 6. Candidates are typically doctors, nurses or paramedics with several years of post-registration experience; the standard examination fee is college-reported at £760 (with lower fees for a single-component resit), and up to five attempts are permitted. Confirm the current regulations, eligibility and fees on the RCSEd exam pages before you book.
For an ATACC user the implication is clear: ATACC material can feed the knowledge that underpins Part A, but Part B is a hands-on practical assessment — airway management, catastrophic haemorrhage control, immobilisation and packaging, scene safety, structured handover — that no lecture, video library or trauma course viva can reproduce for you. Any workflow built on ATACC content should therefore be explicit that it serves the written knowledge layer only, and that the practical stations need supervised, hands-on rehearsal.
The watch–recall–test–retest loop
The loop is deliberately simple, because busy trainees abandon anything elaborate. Its job is to stop passive re-watching from masquerading as revision.
Prime. Before you open an ATACC module, video or set of notes, answer a short diagnostic set of five to eight questions on that topic — ideally fresh SBA items from a DipIMC-aligned source rather than from the course itself. The aim is not to score well; it is to expose what you do not know and to create a reason to watch. A primed learner attends to the two or three things they just got wrong instead of nodding along to the whole recording.
Watch in bounded segments. Take one learning objective at a time — for example, "the pre-hospital management of tension pneumothorax" — and stop the material at the end of that segment. Bounded segments beat marathon sessions because recall works on what you have just encoded, not on ninety minutes of continuous input.
Recall before you check. Close the resource and write, from memory, a concise account of the segment: the decision points, the numbers, the sequence. Only then reopen your notes or the video to correct gaps. This retrieval step — not the watching — is where durable memory forms.
Convert each objective into three prompts. For every learning objective, write one discrimination question ("tension vs simple pneumothorax vs massive haemothorax — what distinguishes them at the roadside?"), one management rule ("needle vs finger thoracostomy: indication and site"), and one "why not the alternative?" prompt ("why is a needle sometimes inadequate in a muscular adult?"). Three prompts per objective turns a passive lecture into a small, testable specification.
Test and retest. Answer fresh questions on the material within 24–48 hours, and again after a longer interval of five to seven days. Crucially, do not replay the same ATACC segment as your "revision". Re-watching a lecture you have already seen produces fluency (it feels familiar) without producing recall (you still cannot retrieve it cold). The retest must use items you have not seen, so that you are measuring transfer rather than memory of one particular clip.
Build a weekly mixed block so course order is not the cue
Courses teach in a sensible order, and that order quietly becomes a crutch: you know the answer is about pelvic haemorrhage because you are on the pelvis module. The real exam interleaves everything. Once a week, assemble a mixed block of 30–40 unseen items that ignores course sequence — trauma next to toxicology next to an obstetric emergency next to a medico-legal item. If your accuracy falls sharply when the topic label is removed, you have found context-dependent knowledge that will not survive Part A. iatroX is a natural home for this mixed, unseen block because its UK core banks let you build timed sets across domains; it covers the Part A knowledge and unseen-MCQ layer, and nothing about the OSPE.
Exit ATACC on exam-format performance, not completion
"I have watched all the ATACC material" is not an outcome. The outcome is measurable: your first-attempt accuracy on unseen, timed, mixed DipIMC-format questions in the trauma and critical-care domains has risen and stayed risen across two spaced retests. When that is true for the domains ATACC actually covers, stop consuming ATACC content for those domains and redirect the hours to the parts of the PHEM blueprint ATACC never addressed — paediatric, obstetric, environmental, toxicological and medico-legal pre-hospital care — and to hands-on OSPE rehearsal. Your bank percentage is a study metric, not an exam score; treat it as a signal to reallocate effort, not as a finish line.
A seven-day plan for a busy trainee
The example below uses ATACC for one defined job — deepening trauma and critical-care knowledge — and iatroX for unseen transfer practice. It assumes a clinician doing perhaps 60–90 focused minutes a day around shifts. Figures are illustrative, not a prediction of your result.
| Day | ATACC job (knowledge input) | iatroX / retrieval job (measurement) |
|---|---|---|
| Mon | Prime + watch: thoracic trauma segment; recall from memory | 8 unseen SBA on chest trauma; log errors by code |
| Tue | Prime + watch: catastrophic haemorrhage and TXA rationale | 8 unseen SBA on haemorrhage/shock; write three prompts each miss |
| Wed | Convert Mon–Tue objectives into discrimination/management/why-not prompts | 24–48h retest of Monday's items (fresh questions, not the same clip) |
| Thu | Prime + watch: airway and pre-hospital emergency anaesthesia governance | 8 unseen SBA on airway/analgesia; check drug facts against the SmPC/eMC |
| Fri | Light review of the week's error log; no new watching | Spaced retest of Tuesday and Thursday items |
| Sat | Rest or a single short segment on a weak spot | 30–40 item mixed, timed block ignoring course order |
| Sun | Plan next week from the error log; note blueprint gaps ATACC did not cover | Re-test only the items still failing; mark domains to hand off to other resources |
The engine of the week is the mismatch between what feels learned after watching and what you can actually retrieve two days later. No proprietary algorithm is involved — just spacing, interleaving and honest measurement on fresh items.
Decision checklist: continue, supplement, switch or stop
- Continue with ATACC only for the trauma and critical-care domains where your unseen accuracy is still climbing and where you genuinely find the material adds knowledge you cannot get faster elsewhere.
- Supplement now — not later — for every non-trauma DipIMC domain, because ATACC does not blueprint to them. Add a DipIMC-specific SBA bank for breadth and iatroX for unseen mixed measurement.
- Switch your primary knowledge source if, after two weeks, your errors cluster in domains ATACC never covers; the fastest fix is a resource mapped to the PHEM curriculum, not more trauma depth.
- Stop using ATACC content for a domain the moment your spaced retest performance is stable and adequate there. Continuing past that point is sunk-cost revision, not learning.
Frequently asked questions
Is ATACC Resources enough for DipIMC on its own? No, and not mainly because of depth — because of scope and format. ATACC is a trauma and critical-care brand whose material is not blueprinted to the RCSEd PHEM curriculum, and it does not publish a DipIMC question bank, so it cannot show you whether you have covered the syllabus or reproduce the exam's SBA format. It can be a strong knowledge input for trauma and critical care, but you will need a DipIMC-specific question source for breadth and unseen practice, and supervised hands-on rehearsal for the OSPE.
Which DipIMC component does ATACC Resources not reproduce well? The Part B OSPE, and by extension the format of Part A. The OSPE is a practical, station-based assessment of skills such as airway management, haemorrhage control, immobilisation and structured handover, which no course video or viva can rehearse for you. ATACC also does not deliver the timed, mixed SBA experience of Part A, so even for written knowledge you are relying on it as raw content rather than as exam-format practice.
How many ATACC Resources questions should I complete per day for DipIMC? There is no meaningful daily ATACC question count, because as of 21 July 2026 ATACC does not publish a DipIMC question bank; treat that figure as zero and plan accordingly. What you can set a daily target for is retrieval: roughly 15–25 fresh, unseen DipIMC-format SBAs a day from a bank that is mapped to the exam, used to test the ATACC material you watched, rather than re-watching the same segments.
When should I stop using ATACC Resources and move to mixed mocks? Stop consuming ATACC content for a domain once your first-attempt accuracy on unseen, timed questions in that domain has risen and held across two spaced retests, and move to mixed, timed mock blocks that interleave every DipIMC domain. If mixed-block accuracy is markedly lower than topic-labelled accuracy, that gap — not the number of videos left to watch — is what tells you to switch to mocks.
How should I combine ATACC Resources with iatroX without duplicating practice? Keep the two jobs separate: use ATACC as the knowledge input (watch, recall, convert to prompts) and use iatroX only for the unseen measurement layer (fresh timed SBAs and weekly mixed blocks that you have not seen in the course). Never re-answer an ATACC-derived item inside iatroX or vice versa; the value comes from testing the same principle on a new question, which is transfer, and from never letting course order act as a cue.
Editorial notes and references
Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 21 July 2026. Vendor and course figures (ATACC qualifications and scope; DipIMC fees) are vendor- or college-reported on the date shown and can change — verify current details on the official pages before relying on them. Disclosure: iatroX operates a competing question bank; its role here is confined to the Part A knowledge and unseen-MCQ measurement layer that ATACC does not claim to provide, and it does not reproduce the OSPE. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com.
References: RCSEd Faculty of Pre-Hospital Care — Diploma in Immediate Medical Care exam details and regulations; ATACC Group training and diploma/fellowship pages; iatroX, "Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score"; iatroX, the DipIMC content-gap checklist; iatroX comparison hub and DipIMC question bank.