A structured walkthrough for every family of station in the CASC. Ten groups, each with a seven-minute clock, the lines to say, the content to cover, and where the marks are lost. Written by a trainee, for trainees.
The CASC is sixteen seven-minute stations. Most candidates who come unstuck do not lack knowledge — they lose the station because they have no structure to carry into it, run out of time, and never reach the plan. The examiner's own list of concerns bears this out: the first six items are about process, and only the seventh is about content.
This resource groups every station into ten families, defined by the task verb on the door, because the verb is what dictates structure. A dementia scenario is four different stations depending on whether you are asked to take a history, speak to the daughter, test cognition, or explain the diagnosis.
In the reading time you identify the verb, name the group in one word, and run that group's clock. That is the whole method.
Learn the spine first — the door drill, the opening, the signposting, the closing and the three bells. It is short, and it is what you fall back on.
Then take one group per session. Read the clock, then close the page and say the phase headings out loud in order. The sub-maps are a menu, not an itinerary: they are deliberately longer than seven minutes so you can choose.
Use Skeleton once you know a group — it hides the scripted lines so you are recalling rather than reading.
Work in threes: candidate, role-player, observer. Keep the clock honest — bells at 0, 6:00 and 7:00, and stop people mid-sentence at seven.
Give the observer the examiner's areas of concern to mark against. That is what turns a polite debrief into a useful one.
Brief your role-player to react to manner, as the real ones are: withhold the key disclosure if rapport has not been built.
Four questions, in order: what am I asked to do; who is opposite me; which group is this; what are my four headings and where does risk sit.
Circle every verb. Most stations hide two tasks, and missing the second is the commonest way to fail a station you knew.
The ten groups map onto six two-hour sessions, which is enough for a regional course. If you want to run one, the session outline, the forms and the facilitation notes exist — get in touch and I will share them.
There is also a printable PDF of everything here, formatted for annotation.
Eight short questions, one of them required. It is the only way I find out what is wrong, out of date, or missing — and corrections from people who have just sat the exam are the most useful kind.
Prefer email? Write to mohammed.alsayeh@nhs.net.
Built by Dr Mohammed Alsayeh, a psychiatry trainee in Birmingham, while preparing for the September 2026 CASC, after a deanery mock exam produced a familiar piece of feedback: the communication was fine, the structure was not.
It is maintained because the same gap shows up in almost every trainee's mock feedback, and because a structure is a cheaper thing to fix than a knowledge base.
If something here is wrong, out of date, or reads badly in a real station, please say so. Corrections from people who have just sat the exam are the most useful kind.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
It contains no examination material. The priority bands are a teaching judgement about where rehearsal pays off, informed by the published blueprint and by CASC course syllabi. They are not a prediction of station content and no recalled station appears anywhere in it.
The walkthroughs are original. Published guides and course syllabi were used to check that no common station family had been left out, not as a source to draw from.
A scaffold for practice, not a clinical reference and not a script to recite. Drug doses, monitoring intervals and legal detail change: check them against the current BNF, NICE guidance and the Mental Health Act Code of Practice before you rely on any of them, in the exam or on a ward.