I was having a bit of a clear-out at home today when I found my old notes and exam papers for my Special exam. Back in the day after achieving professional registration we would do the IBMS Special exam. Billed as MSc equivalent you couldn’t progress at all in our line of work without having passed the Special exam, and it had a reputation for being incredibly difficult. Pretty much everyone with whom I worked when I first started told me they had failed the exam several times.
The Special exam consisted of three written papers which together accounted for fifty per cent of the mark, and a practical project accounting for the other fifty per cent.
I passed it on the first attempt, and having passed it I wasn’t obliged to do any kind of professional updating of my knowledge and skills until CPD became mandatory some twenty years later.
Looking at the old papers I took has made me realise just how vital it is that dinosaurs like me do CPD…
Paper One
- A two-hour essay. Look at the options.Is there a need for change in how we are trained? Change was to be avoided at all costs!!
- “Side Room Testing” was the devil’s work and conjured up visions of nurses playing at science. No one dreamed of the likes of us doing near patient testing.
- The future revolutionizing what we do? Pah. We thought it would. In fact we now do far less tests and send everything interesting to specialist labs… who themselves don’t actually have that much of a variety in what they do either with everyone specializing in different things.
- “Clinical Budgeting” was a management catch-phrase of the mid 1980s which has long since been superceded by other equally well forgotten terms.
Paper Two
Two one-hour essays. Again look at the options.
- Vitamin B12 deficiency. Back in the day it was radio isotopes and the Schilling test. (You’ve never heard of it, have you!)
- Erythropoetin… blah on about that for an hour?
- Laboratory investigation of myelodysplastic syndromes? Yes – we used to do that. Gets sent away now.
- Complement… don’t get me started. Back then absolutely everything that science couldn’t explain was down to complement.
- Automated diffs – that was the future. Bear in mind this was only two years after the launch of the first analyser to do a five-part differential count.
Paper Three
Three forty minute essays.
- Safety and AIDS. Bear in mind that this was only four years after HIV had been discovered, and that I was told that in 1981 the average life expectancy of people in our line of work was fifty-seven. No one ever actually said that we used to die from that which we caught in the lab, but that was implied.
- Bleeding time… don’t laugh. We used to do them. We really did cut someone and time how long they bled for.
- Rouleaux and plasma cells… string that out for forty minutes.
- Heparin monitoring… anti-Xa assays were years into the future.
- LAP – that used to be an interesting test to do. Not done one for years.
- Red cell survival rather went the way of the Schilling test. There’s only so much radiation you can inject into people.
Project
I spent an age working up a way of
identifying haemoglobinopathies by iso-electric focusing. Like everyone else
doing the Special exam I put a lot of effort into devising a technique which
would never actually be used.
It is pretty obvious that the future
expected from the mid-eighties wasn’t the future that came forty years later.
