CAI statement regarding in person examinations

The Examinations Committee and Council of the College have agreed the following;

The MCAI MCQ and FCAI written examinations will continue to be delivered online.

The MCAI OSCE/SOE and the FCAI Clinical examination will return to in person format in Autumn 2022 in Dublin. We hope that International centres will return in 2024. If an in person examinations need to be cancelled and replaced with online delivery at least 2 months notice will be given to candidates.

The FCAI Clinical examination will replace the major clinical case with multiple short cases. There will be three individual structured oral examinations (SOE). Each SOE will comprise six clinical cases, which will be examined in detail. Five minutes is allocated to each clinical case. Therefore, in total each SOE will last 30 minutes and total testing time will be 90 minutes.

SOE 1 will focus on perioperative medicine, patient optimisation and data interpretation.

SOE 2 will examine all aspects of general anaesthesia and pain medicine.

SOE 3 will test knowledge on intensive care medicine and advanced sciences which underpin the practice of anaesthesiology.

Each question will start with a short clinical scenario and will map to the anaesthesiology curriculum as either a core, modular and specialist units.