The respiratory specialty certificate exam (SCE) is the final exam hurdle prior to obtaining your certificate of completion of training (CCT) to become a respiratory consultant. Most people recommend you first attempt this tricky exam sometime in ST5 as you will have had a decent amount of time in respiratory (rather than general medicine) but will also allow yourself 3 attempts. Hopefully you won’t need all these attempts but with exams there are many factors that can influence your result that day.

10 Asthma/COPD questions for the Respiratory SCE consists of 10 difficult questions set at (and possibly above) the level of the respiratory SCE, that I spent a significant amount of time and effort personally crafting, related to the area of asthma and COPD. Each question vignette follows the SCE format and is followed by five possible and plausible answers. You will be given a detailed fully referenced answer why the correct answer is correct, and why each of the others are incorrect. The references are aimed at hopefully prompting you to do further reading.

One of the main difficulties with the respiratory SCE is the limited number of questions you have from standard question banks so every single one will increase your chances of passing. If you use the well known websites for MRCP parts 1 and 2 for example you have around 10,000 questions to work through but this is not the case for the respiratory SCE where you’d be lucky to scrape together 500 questions.

To get access to your own PDF version click on 10 Asthma/COPD questions for the Respiratory SCE.

I passed the respiratory SCE on my first attempt in ST4 in October 2018. I’m currently studying and researching advanced airways disease in Scotland and am working towards a MD degree in asthma. I currently have 15 peer reviewed high impact factor publications in pubmed in the areas of asthma, COVID and COPD.