The exam

Today I had to get the train to Guy’s hospital in London to take an exam that I had been getting ready for for the past 6 months, it wasn’t the nicest experience as we all knew that it would be difficult but it was harder than I imagined. The exam is for pharmacy technicians and its called an OSCE and we have 7 stations with an actor on and an assessor and you have 9 mins on each station. 4 of those stations are what we call drug histories where we have to question the actor about their medication history and the other 3 stations are counselling stations where you have to counsel the actor/patient on the use of either an inhaler which could be any type of inhaler so you have to learn about all of them, it could be an ear drop, nose drop or nasal spray or eye drop or an oral syringe. The only one you know for definite that you get is an epi pen. I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I would have been, I did buy some quite life tablets in Boots though and I think they helped as normally I suffer really badly with my nerves if I am worried about anything. The time flew by in the exam but I know that I messed up 2 of the stations so I can’t afford to fail any more as you are only allowed to fail 2. After the exam we all said that it was much harder than we thought it would be and that we thought there were too many things in there that felt like tricks. We have to wait about 4 weeks for the results but we may be able to find out next week when someone from work goes to visit the exam board. It sucks that you cannot retake until July – that’s 8 months away!