RCA Mandatory criteria

From December 2020, RCA candidates are allowed to link up to two possible cases for each mandatory criteria.

This is a change from previously where candidates were categorising consultations as to the clinical topic, the age of the patient etc. Where as now candidates are being asked to select criteria best suited to a case.

To reiterate, just because a consultation involves a child or you have linked a topic such as "Reproductive Health and maternity", it doesn't mean that you should then automatically link it to that criteria. The consultation should reflect the impact of the condition on the patient, rather than it simply being incidental to the clinical scenario.

Whilst a case may represent more than one criteria, in doing so this may inadvertently cause a double breach if that case were disallowed. Candidates may chose therefore to allocate a single criteria best suited to a case, rather than multiple links to fewer of their selected cases.

Therefore, candidates will have to relink cases to the mandatory criteria, once the new functionality to link cases has been introduced to the FourteenFish system (it went live in the afternoon of Tuesday 15th of December).

Maximums enforced

From 1st March 2021, the system will now prevent trainees from submitting more than 2 cases for each criteria.