Oral medication calculations
4 marks of the 15 in Part A, which runs for 30 minutes.
This is the biggest numeracy category, and the one you are most likely to be doing on a shift. A prescription, a stock strength on a bottle or a blister pack, and one question: how much do you give?
What this section asks about
- Tablets and capsules where the prescribed dose is a multiple of the stock strength
- Scored tablets, where half a tablet is a legitimate answer and a quarter usually is not
- Oral liquids labelled as a dose in a volume, such as 125 mg in 5 mL
- Prescriptions written in grams against stock labelled in milligrams
Where the marks go
4 marks of the 15 in Part A, which runs for 30 minutes.
Every numeracy question sits at the apply and analyse level: you are given a situation and asked to work something out, rather than to recall a fact.
Where candidates lose marks
- Forgetting the conversion. A dose of 1.5 g against 500 mg tablets is three tablets, not one.
- Using the volume as though it were the strength. In 125 mg/5 mL the strength is 125 mg, and the 5 mL is what carries it.
- Answering with a number of tablets that cannot be given. Only scored tablets can be halved.
Questions people ask
- How many oral medication questions are in Part A?
- It is the largest of the six numeracy categories in the published test specification, so expect more of these than of any other single type.
- Are the drugs in the questions real?
- The drugs and strengths are the ones you meet in UK practice, taken from the BNF. The scenarios are written for practice; they are not past exam questions.
Practise this section
Practice is filtered by section, so you can work on this one on its own. Every account gets 10 new questions a day without a card.