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SPECIALTIES
Anaesthetics and Intensive Care Medicine
Training in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine in the UK — the seven-year pathway and the FRCA.
Anaesthetics in the UK is a seven-year run-through training programme following the Foundation Programme, leading to a CCT in anaesthesia. Trainees enter at CT1 and progress through core anaesthetic training (CT1–CT3, often partly combined with intensive care medicine via the ACCS pathway) and higher specialist training (ST4–ST7). A separate three-year dual-CCT pathway in Intensive Care Medicine is offered through joint training with anaesthesia, medicine, or emergency medicine.
The Fellowship of the Royal College of Anaesthetists (FRCA) is taken in two stages — the Primary FRCA (during core training) and the Final FRCA (during higher training). The exams cover basic and applied pharmacology, physiology, physics, equipment, and the safe conduct of anaesthesia across all settings.
Anaesthetics has been one of the most competitive specialties for entry to higher training in recent years, partly because of its lifestyle and shift-pattern characteristics, and partly because of the strong overlap with emergency, peri-operative and intensive care medicine.
Current authoritative resources
About this page
This page is one of a set of medical school and medical careers resources on chrispaton.org, replacing the category landings of New Media Medicine (newmediamedicine.com), an early digital health blog and UK medical school applications community I ran between 2004 and 2014. The original New Media Medicine forum threads — user-generated content from that community — are not republished here; this is original framing written to help current applicants find authoritative information. Always confirm details with the official sources linked above before acting on them.