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POSTGRADUATE TRAINING
MRCP (Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians)
The postgraduate diploma required for entry to higher specialty training in internal medicine and most physician specialties in the UK.
Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians (MRCP UK) is the postgraduate diploma that medical trainees must pass to progress beyond Internal Medicine Training (IMT) into higher specialty training in the physician specialties — cardiology, respiratory, gastroenterology, endocrinology, and so on. It is jointly awarded by the Royal College of Physicians of London, of Edinburgh, and of Glasgow.
The diploma has three components. Part 1 is a multiple-choice written exam taken after one year of IMT, covering broad basic and clinical medicine. Part 2 Written is a longer applied-knowledge written exam. Part 2 Clinical (PACES — Practical Assessment of Clinical Examination Skills) is an OSCE-style clinical exam with stations covering history-taking, communication, examination of cardiovascular, respiratory, abdominal, neurological and other systems.
Each part has its own fee, sitting frequency, and pass rate, and the structure has changed in recent years — for example, the move to electronic delivery of Part 1 and Part 2 Written. The MRCP UK Federation publishes detailed regulations and exemplar questions on its website.
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.