Unofficial Guide to Passing OSCEs: Candidate Briefings, Pati Paperback – 31 Mar 2013

This book is a good resource as it covers a wide range of topics, however it is severely lacking in several departments.Things I liked:1) The illustrations are excellent and very useful. Clear, crisp and relevant!2)Topics are relevant! Some textbooks contain stations you would never come across, the ones in this book are all pretty much standard OSCE stations.Things I disliked1) The "build" quality of the book is appalling. You *will* have pages come loose from the book completely, as the book became fairly popular amongst some of my med school chums, and all have experienced it. Secondly ink seems to come away from some of the fundoscopy pictures, which is not great either. This book is quite expensive, so there is absolutely no excuse for this.2) The range of stations covered whilst good, needs more in certain departments for example the topics covered for ortho and rheum are distinctly lacking, as are topics for neuro, which are pretty sparse bar examinations. I would have expected better from a book in it's third iteration.3) There is no overarching flow or structure to the stations, which in it self is not inherently problematic and is good for those looking for a quick reference. If you are looking to structure your approach and need help in this department, there are better books out there. Also how many of these quotes by clinicians which are present almost on every page, taking up a sizeable chunk of room are actually useful?In parting, there are just too many negatives to overlook with this book. I applaud the effort, and there are grounds for a great textbook, but it needs reworking. A senior editor needs to pull the entire book to an overall theme, and stop wasting the space with useless quotations/advertisements (REALLY? Ads in a textbook, I know its for charity but come on! £30 and you put ads inside the book?) and fill that space with more stations and more crisp images. If they can achieve that, then this will be the osce guide book!Update:1 year on (with no use in that year really till finals came up a month or so ago) and several pages are now out of the book and have dissapeared into the unknown. Some of the stations are just poorly written and poorly put together. Much recommend the masterpass series instead.

While the content is mostly good, concise and useful there are quite a few things missing. The made gripe I have with this book though is its construction quality. After a year of flicking through it (only during exam times) the pages are falling out all over the place! At £26 for a book it is expensive so I don't understand why the construction is so shoddy!

This is a fantastic book to prepare for OSCE examinations. It prepared me well for my Physician Associate finals!

Useful for final year medical school OSCEs, still used in later training as an occasional reference book for clinical examinations

well written easy to read and follow I feel well prepared

As a house we used this book everyday when it came to exam times. It has plenty of scenarios and mark schemes for each topic. You will also see questions at the end of each scenario which is similar to what you would expect in OSCE stations. It covers every topic you would expect for the exam.

Wonderful book

I bought this after borrowing a copy from the BMA library. It's really excellent for osce revision, either independent revision or for a study group. Arrived today in excellent condition, very pleased