A 12-Week FRCS (Plast) Revision Plan

Who this is for

Registrars who meet the eligibility criteria, have a Section 1 sitting about three months away and are working a full rota. It assumes you have several years of plastic surgery behind you and need to turn clinical experience into exam-ready judgement, not learn the specialty from scratch. If several areas are weak, or you are further out, use the six-month variant below. For the format and rules, read the exam guide first.

Principles

Question-first revision

Answer a timed block on a topic before you read about it. The questions you get wrong, or right for the wrong reason, define what you read. That is faster than reading a chapter end to end, and closer to what the paper asks of you.

Spaced repetition

Return to every area at widening intervals: a few days, then a week or two, then a month. A topic covered once in week 2 and never again will have faded by the exam, so each week below includes a review block of questions from earlier weeks.

Confidence rating

Mark each answer as sure, unsure or guessed. A wrong guess is a gap. A wrong answer you were sure of is a dangerous misconception: a belief you would act on in the exam and in clinic. Review those first, every week.

Timed mocks

Each paper allows a little over a minute per question. Pace is a skill learned only against the clock, so do timed blocks from week 1 and full papers from week 8.

Revising around a rota

Plan for the weeks that go wrong. A short daily habit — ten questions on the commute, or the five-question Daily Five between cases — survives nights and on-calls, and frees rest days for longer blocks and mocks.

The plan at a glance

Weeks 1–4: foundations

General principles underpin regional questions. A lower-leg reconstruction question is often really about angiosomes and perforators; a skin cancer question often turns on margins and a graft-or-flap decision. Secure these first.

• Week 1: wound healing phases, hypertrophic and keloid scars, chronic wounds and negative pressure, dressings, sutures, local anaesthetic doses and toxicity, tourniquets.
• Week 2: graft take and failure, split versus full thickness, donor sites; flap classification, local flap geometry, angiosomes and delay. Start with flap classification and skin graft take.
• Week 3: microvascular anastomosis, flap monitoring and failure, replantation, tissue expansion, biomaterials and lasers.
• Week 4: skin and soft tissue. Learn current NICE and BAD margin and sentinel node thresholds exactly; they are classic discriminators.

Weeks 5–8: regional surgery

These weeks carry the most clinical content. For each stem, decide what you would actually do next for that patient, then check it against the current guideline.

• Week 5: hand trauma, fingertip and nailbed injuries, fractures, and flexor and extensor tendons by zone.
• Week 6: nerve compression, Dupuytren’s disease, scaphoid and carpal instability, arthritis, infection and congenital hand; then upper limb and peripheral nerve.
• Week 7: head, neck and craniofacial: facial fractures, facial nerve, subunit reconstruction, cleft and craniosynostosis.
• Week 8: breast, trunk and perineum and lower limb, including open fracture standards. Finish with a timed 120-question paper.

Weeks 9–10: burns, paediatric, aesthetic and professional

• Week 9: burns — assessment, referral, resuscitation, inhalation injury, chemical and electrical burns, excision and grafting — and paediatric topics, including safeguarding.
• Week 10: aesthetic surgery and non-surgical treatments, then professional practice and statistics. Statistics rewards practice at calculation, not reading. Sit your first full two-paper mock at the end of the week.

Weeks 11–12: mocks and repair

1. Review the week 10 mock in full, plus every confident wrong answer from the whole plan. Write the correct principle in one line for each.
2. Sweep your three weakest areas by score with targeted blocks, then re-test them.
3. Sit a second full two-paper mock early in week 12 under exam timing, and review it.
4. In the final days, do short mixed blocks and reread your misconception list. Stop heavy new reading and rest before the exam.

If you have 6 weeks

Compress; do not skip. Pair the weeks — 1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7–8 and 9–10 each become one week — and keep the sixth week for mocks and repair. Raise the load to roughly 30–40 questions a day, read only what your errors point to, and sit a full two-paper mock at the end of week 5. You will cover the syllabus once rather than twice, so lean on spaced review of your errors.

If you have 6 months

Use the extra time for depth and repetition, not a slower first pass. Spread weeks 1–10 over the first four months, reading the core texts properly alongside the questions. Use month five for a second pass through every area by questions alone, weakest first. Keep month six for mocks and repair, with full two-paper mocks at its start and end.

Whichever version you follow, get a baseline from the free questions, check the scope against the syllabus, use the learning library for recurring principles, and sit full papers on mock exams.