I'm a registrar in anesthesiology preparing for the EDAIC Part I and the sheer scope of the syllabus is genuinely intimidating. Physiology, pharmacology, physics, statistics — and each domain goes deep enough that surface-level revision doesn't feel sufficient.
I've been using the BJA Education articles as my primary resource and supplementing with Peck, Hill, and Williams for physics and measurement. The MCQ format for Part I means I need to recognize correct answers under time pressure, not just understand the concepts loosely. That requires a different kind of drilling than I'm used to from written exams.
Which domains have people found disproportionately represented in recent sittings? I've heard physiology is the heaviest but I'd like a sense of how the pharmacology content compares — specifically receptor pharmacology and drug interactions.
Sitting in October. I have about 4.5 months and I'm trying to build a structured plan rather than just reading broadly and hoping it sticks.
Physics and measurement catches people off guard because it's easy to deprioritize and then run out of time. Gas laws, Doppler principles, and the physics of flow through circuits — those are high yield and people who've been out of medical school a few years often need a full refresh. Budget more time than you think for that section.
BJA Education is solid but add the Yentis, Hirsch, Smith textbook for quick-reference summaries on pharmacology. The pharmacokinetics questions — volume of distribution, clearance, context-sensitive half-life — tend to be exact calculation type rather than conceptual, so know your formulas cold.
Physiology is definitely the heaviest — cardiovascular and respiratory together probably account for 35-40% of Part I questions in my experience. Pharmacology is second and receptor mechanisms do come up a lot, particularly for volatile agents and neuraxial drugs. Don't underinvest there.
4.5 months is enough if you're disciplined. I did 6-week domain blocks — physiology first, then pharm, then physics — with 2 weeks of cross-domain MCQ drilling at the end. The switching to timed mixed questions in the final 2 weeks is what actually built my exam speed.
Quick update from me -- sat a full mock last weekend and scored 68%, which honestly surprised me given how rough the physics section felt going in. I've been hammering Peck's Physics for Anaesthetists and it's starting to click, especially the gas laws stuff. Still weak on stats though, that's my next focus.
Planning to sit the real thing in October so I've got about four months which feels tight but doable. The breadth is brutal but I've found chunking it by system rather than trying to cover everything at once has helped a lot. Don't let the syllabus paralyse you -- just pick a domain and go deep on it for a week or two before moving on.
I've found the biggest shift for me was stopping trying to remember the right answer and instead figuring out exactly why each wrong answer is wrong. It sounds obvious but it changes how you read questions completely. Like if you get a physiology SBA wrong, don't just note the correct option and move on — work out the mechanism that makes the distractors plausible but incorrect. That way you're building actual understanding rather than pattern matching, which falls apart the second they phrase something differently.
For the basic sciences stuff, I've been using free edaic basic sciences questions and doing them slowly with a textbook open, not timed at first. It's slower but you retain it. The BJA articles are great for filling gaps but they didn't really help me until I had enough foundational knowledge to see why things mattered. Start with questions, identify your weak spots, then go to the reading — not the other way around.
Just passed Part I last month so this thread hit close to home. Honestly, the thing that actually moved the needle for me wasn't reading more — it was doing questions on the specific weird intersections between topics, like how pharmacokinetics changes in different physiological states. I'd been treating each domain as its own silo and that was the mistake. Once I started drilling free edaic basic sciences questions that forced me to connect physiology and pharmacology in the same vignette, patterns started sticking in a way that passive reading never achieved.
Don't underestimate physics and stats either — they're easy marks if you've actually practiced them, and a lot of people ignore them until it's too late. You won't master every topic deeply, and that's fine. Know the high-yield concepts cold, and make sure you can apply them under pressure rather than just recognise them on a page. That distinction is everything in this exam.
Quick update from my end — sat a 120-question mock last weekend and got 68%, which honestly felt better than I expected given I'd barely touched physics. Pharmacology is starting to click, though I still blank on some of the receptor kinetics stuff under timed conditions.
I'm aiming for the February sitting so I've got about four months left. It's tight but I think it's doable if I stop trying to read everything and just drill the weak spots. Good luck to everyone else grinding through this, it's a beast of an exam.