Pediatric critical care boards

 There is unfortunately no real study guide for the pediatric critical care boards and hence I decided to create this blog post. 

The content outline for the Pediatric critical care exam can be found here and/or here. I am sure they will update it with time passing each year. The exam itself is 200 questions long divided into 2 sections of 2h 15m each with a 30 min break in between. Approximately 4.5 hours long in total. Details can be found here. 

This is another image that the ABP will send you closer to the exam date

Stuff that I used

1. PediaLink/Prep ICU: Prep ICU has approximately 72 questions per year, each focusing on different topics/concepts. It is NOT as streamlined as the pediatric boards questions which is a bit frustrating since you cannot focus on different topics/concepts. In addition, my program director used to send the fellows a question a week with her weekly update email, which was really useful. I created a OneNote book and just started filing them into their respective section. For more details please watch this video which I created for the pediatric boards.

2. Pediatric Critical Care: Text and Study Guide [Lucking et al]: I personally loved the 1st edition as it was succinct and to the point. If you have access to it, then I would use it alone and NOT buy the 2nd edition. I bought the 2nd edition but I think it was too much like a textbook and I ended up NOT using it. I used it for concepts for a little bit but overall I personally liked the 1st edition way more.

3. Old prep questions: Like I mentioned in point 1, there are VERY few questions each year in PrepICU and hence if you get access to old question banks I would use them to study/revise. Please note that since guidelines change, the older the prep questions the more incorrect they can be. For example, the surviving sepsis guidelines have changed a lot since the 2013-2014 set of questions.

4. I bought the Multiprofessional critical care review course which can be found here. In hindsight, I am not sure if this was a great use of my CME money. The teaching videos that you get from the course are amazing and I think I would definitely do the online video section alone if possible since you get education from the leaders in the field. However, the in-person course was a bit lacking, and in their defense, as this was the first time a new hybrid method was being trialed and I think they will get better with time. 

5. I also used the multiple-choice questions that SCCM has which can be found here. The questions themself were not hard. They are more factual and you either know the answer or you don't. It really helped me in solidifying my concepts a bit more, to be frank. The question bank gives you approximately 240 questions. Again, I am not sure if this helped me but I would rather just pass the boards in one attempt than have to do it all over again and hence I did it. 

Once I kind of went through the resources mentioned above once and then I did it a couple more times till I remembered the reasoning and rationale for almost all the questions. 

My personal journey/timeline

Thanks to my colleagues I had approximately 1 week of time off prior to the boards. My studying was not as pristine as I would have liked it to be but overall when you practice PICU you kind of are learning at the same time. Also, the one thing that really is nice about the ABP boards is that they ask you clinically relevant questions and things that you will encounter in your day-to-day practice which is way better than the obscure genetic questions that you would see in the pediatric boards. 

Date of Exam: Nov 3, 2022

Date of result: Dec 12, 2022

Result: Passed