[Music] hi everyone I'm Chris from geeky medics in this video we're going to discuss everything you need to know about the UK medical licensing assessment also called the UK MLA we're going to cover the format of the assessment the topics it covers and most importantly how to revise for it so what exactly is the UK medical licensing assessment well the UK MLA is a new mandatory assessment for all UK medical students and it's being overseen by the General Medical Council or GMC the UK MLA must be passed in order to graduate medical school to join the medical register and to eventually work as a doctor the UK MLA is a new assessment and it's going to affect all medical students who graduate in the Academic Year 2024-2025 and those graduating after then so there are two components to the UK MLA firstly there's the applied Knowledge Test or akt and secondly there's the clinical and professional skills assessment or cpsa let's look at these in more detail the applied Knowledge Test or akt is a multiple choice exam which uses single best answer questions the akt is being designed nationally led by the medical schools Council and medical schools will be allocated papers from a National Bank the akt will involve medical students taking two papers each with a hundred questions the akt is going to be an online exam but it will be held in person under exam conditions at your local medical school if you're not familiar with single best answer questions I've created a separate video where I explain the format and walk through an example question so you may be wondering what is the akt pass Mark how many questions do I have to get right in order to pass the paper well there's no single overall set pass Mark for the akt it's not as simple as saying well if you get 50 questions correct you've passed the paper remember different medical schools will be allocated different akt papers and those different papers will have different types of questions although they'll all broadly cover the same content each akt paper undergoes a process called standard setting this involves a panel of experts assessing each question and this standard setting process takes into account the variabilities in question difficulty between each paper so let's move on now and look at the clinical and professional skills assessment so the cpsa is a practical assessment of clinical and professional skills now unlike the akt the cpsa is designed and delivered by your medical school but it's validated by the General Medical Council this means the cpsa will vary between medical schools and there could be various potential formats the most commonly used format is the oski or the objective structured clinical examination so just to recap the UK medical licensing assessment or UK MLA is going to be made up of the applied Knowledge Test which is going to be a national multiple choice exam with two papers each with a hundred single best answer questions and the clinical and professional skills assessment or cpsa is going to be a practical assessment created locally by medical schools but quality assured and validated by the GMC let's move on now and look at what are the topics which could be tested as part of the UK MLA and how you can prepare for this assessment the General Medical Council have produced the UK MLA content map now this is a really important document which sets out the content that could be tested in the medical licensing assessment and it's available on the GMC website the content map is divided into 24 areas of clinical practice 311 conditions 212 patient presentations and 12 areas of Professional Knowledge we're going to look at these in a bit more detail now so these are the areas of clinical practice in the content map now you'll notice in some situations medical and surgical Specialties have been combined for example there's renal medicine and Urology another example is neurosciences which involves both neurology and Neurosurgery conditions and patient presentations have been mapped to all of these areas of clinical practice and we're going to look at conditions and presentations in a bit more detail now a condition is defined as a pathophysiological disease or a clinical diagnosis and examples include appendicitis lung cancer and thyrotoxicosis each condition is mapped to an area of practice and some conditions appear in multiple areas for example anemia is a broad condition which does appear in multiple areas of clinical practice we can show this in more detail by looking at which conditions appear most frequently across several clinical practice areas so here we can see that anemia substance use disorder and cardiac failure are each mapped to six areas of clinical practice and these reflect that these are broad conditions which can appear in multiple contexts other examples on this list are also common for example obesity stroke and deep vein thrombosis so these are really important conditions to know about when you're preparing for the UK MLA let's move on now and look at presentations a presentation is defined as signs symptoms investigation results and other relevant patient related issues and examples include chest pain and urinary incontinence so these are the things that patients are going to present with now once again each presentation is mapped to an area of clinical practice and some presentations appear in multiple areas like we did for conditions we can look at the UK MLA content map and we can identify those presentations which appear most frequently across multiple areas of clinical practice so here we can see the most common UK MLA presentations of breathlessness trauma and urinary symptoms and these appear in nine areas of clinical practice other common presentations include chest pain fever and acute and chronic pain management so once again when you're preparing for the UK MLA these are really key presentations to know about finally there are the areas of Professional Knowledge and these cover other areas which are important for clinical practice including knowledge of biochemistry biomedical science medical ethics and law and histopathology and more information about these is available in the UK MLA content map hopefully now you have a clearer idea of the topics which could be tested as part of the UK MLA questions in the akt will align with the UK MLA content map so each question is probably going to map to either a condition a presentation or an area of Professional Knowledge and in the cpsa the Practical stations which you need to complete will also align with the content map for example you could have a station where you need to explain a diagnosis of essential hypertension to a patient an essential hypertension is a condition listed in the content map so you can see how the content map is such an important document because this is really going to guide your preparation for the UK MLA so as well as using the content map to Target your UK MLA preparation it's also important to understand how to answer single best answer questions and the key here really is to practice get used to that single best answer format especially if you only have experience of answering traditional multiple choice questions another way you can prepare for the UK MLA is to work on improving your clinical reasoning skills and your ability to apply medical knowledge remember the akt or the applied Knowledge Test is testing your ability to apply medical knowledge here at geeky Medics we have several resources to help you with your UK MLA preparation our oski station collection contains over 900 ready-made oski stations covering most conditions in the UK MLA content map the geeky Medics clinical examination guide summarizes all of the key examinations you could be asked to perform in a practical examination and how to interpret clinical signs finally we have over 5000 free mcqs available on the geeky Medics quiz platform and we have over 2 000 Advanced single best answer questions available in our question packs I hope you found this video useful and I hope now you have a better understanding of the UK MLA make sure you subscribe to our channel to be the first to see our latest videos [Music] foreign