The assessments: WPBA, AKT & CSA

Workplace-Based Assessment (WPBA)

This is a continual test of your performance in the workplace over the training period and is used to assess whether your performance is improving during training and whether you reach the required standard by the end of training.

WPBA uses assessment to provide high-quality formative feedback that should help you to develop and covers the whole of the curriculum because it tests what GPs actually do.

It uses a range of tests such as the Consultation Observation Tool (COT) and Case-Based Discussion (CBD) and gathers information from educators, patients and colleagues. Importantly, it also uses your own reflections on practice and your insights about your own performance. This is tested because in independent practice doctors can only stay safe if they have the ability and motivation to reflect on their work and continually learn.

Clinical Skills Assessment (CSA)

The clinical skills assessment is an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE)-type examination that tests the skills you use in consultation and looks at:

How you identify what the problem is by gathering information from listening and talking with patients, from physical examination, tests and investigations
How you put this together to develop a differential diagnosis and management plan through discussion with the patient
How well you use your interpersonal skills, treating the patient with concern and respect, and communicating effectively with them even in difficult circumstances

You need to demonstrate that you can integrate these skills and apply them fluently, which is a complex task that requires considerable consulting experience. For this reason, CSA cannot be taken until the final year of training.

Applied Knowledge Test (AKT)

GPs require an extensive broad knowledge base about clinical medicine and, importantly, they need to know when and how to acquire specialist information. Other areas of knowledge, like critical appraisal and practice management, are also tested.

The Applied Knowledge Test is therefore more challenging than you might be expecting and requires you to know facts, but also to make decisions based on what you think is likely, or what approaches you think are appropriate in a given scenario.

AKT will test common things as well as rarer but important conditions that, for example, you might be expected to consider in a differential diagnosis.

Like the CSA, you will need a good deal of GP experience and to really understand the curriculum before you are likely to be successful in the exam. For this reason it cannot be taken until the second year of specialist training.

Back to Assessment page

Back to User Guide home page