MCEM Part A Study Guide/Introduction

This is intended to be a study guide for The Membership Examination of the College of Emergency Medicine Part A (Basic Sciences). Its a pretty narrow scope, but I guess that makes web publication more suitable.

I originally started out using Revision Notes for MCEM Part A (Oxford Specialty Training: Revision Texts) edited by Mark Harrison. It was essentially the only study guide available, and reading through 500 pages seemed much more attractive than reading through six 1000 page textbooks to distill the necessary information myself. However as I was making my way through the textbook I realized that there were numerous mistakes, and many others had also noticed this. I started to lose faith in the book and was turning to the aforementioned 1000 page textbooks to affirm every fact - entirely what I was trying to avoid. Ironically, it seemed Wikipedia was more reliable than the textbook for much of the information. Furthermore, I couldn't find an errata page to facilitate sharing the mistakes I was finding.

I reluctantly abandoned my use of the textbook, and using the syllabus directly to guide me, and writing notes myself. I have always been a fan of the "Open" movement (Open Source, Open Access, Open Data etc.) and it seemed daft not to share these notes with anybody else who wanted them. Given the difficulty that the aforementioned MCEM textbook had with simple errors, and the comparative success of Wikipedia, a collaborative editing design seemed most likely to succeed.

The MCEM Part A curriculum is very well structured and provides a good indication as to the amount of detail required, and will provide the basic structure for the Wikibook. It is essential that this guide be kept as brief and concise as possible ie. rigorously stick to the syllabus.