Little confused about the MRCP diploma in medicine

Firstly, you only take the MRCP if you want to become a physician. You can take Part 1 after FY1, or as soon after that as you feel ready. Having passed Part 1 is an advantage for specialty applications, but the fail rate is pretty high. You can then take Part 2 written any time after Part 1, and PACES (the practical) any time up to 7 years after passing Part 1, but if you want to progress you need to have passed by the time you're applying for registrar (ST3) jobs. If you want to do anything other than medicine (i.e. surgery, paeds, anaesthetics...) you have to take the relevant membership exams for those specialties, which all have their own slightly different schedule.

If you don't get your first choice of specialty/core training, either you take up an offer of an alternative, take a non-training post and reapply next year, or leave the country. There are probably more complicated options, but that's the gist of it.

Ahh okay thank you !
If you don't mind can you clear up a few terms? What do youu mean by physician exactly? What can you become without the qualification?

Also if surgery, paeds etc make up things other than medicine, what constitutes medicine?
Sorry, I'm lacking a bit of knowledge with the terms

General Medicine is a bit of a catch-all term which is hard to define properly, but once you get into hospital medicine, it's one of those things you "just know." The simplest definition is that it's anything non-surgical. Generally it's used to apply to adults (though not always - I work in Paeds Medicine at the moment, for example). It encompasses system-specific specialties like cardiology, respiratory, renal, endocrinology etc, plus all those patients where we don't quite know what's wrong but need to send somewhere!

If you want to become a consultant in any of the above, plus any other medical specialties you care to think of, you will need to take MRCP. It used to be not unheard-of for people pursuing other specialties e.g. radiology and anaesthesia to also take at least Part 1 of the MRCP.

Ahh I see thank you very much It's a lot clearer now! I have 2 interviews+BMAT in the space of 2 weeks so I'm kind of running around like a headless chicken doing lots of things at once!

Then MRCP is probably fairly low down on what you need to be thinking about! All you need to know is that for career progression in the UK, you need to pass the membership exams for the college representing whichever specialty you want to end up in. I don't think more detail than that is essential.

Two interviews already is really good! Good luck!

Thank youuu
Sorry I have one last question! Do you have to pass the college exams when applying for consultant posts after speciality training or before speciality training?