Your portfolio is half the exam

Part 1 is the part candidates revise for. Part 2 is the part they underestimate. The portfolio — a workplace risk assessment and a clinical case, defended at a 20-minute oral viva — carries real marks, and it cannot be produced in a weekend. Treat it as assessment, not admin. It also has a hard deadline: both reports (1,500–2,000 words in total, on the Faculty’s template) must be finished and uploaded with your exam application by the registration closing date. Nothing can be changed after that.

The workplace visit is the foundation. Arrange it early — access is a common reason people miss a sitting. Go with a structure in your head: what the process is, what the hazards are, who is exposed and for how long, what controls already exist, and where they sit in the hierarchy of control. Take notes on the day; you will not remember the extraction system three weeks later. Then write it as a risk assessment, not a travelogue: hazard, exposed group, existing controls, residual risk, recommendations, and who should act.

The clinical case must be a patient you saw and examined yourself (a Faculty requirement) and genuinely reasoned about — a return-to-work, a health surveillance referral, an adjustment negotiation — with the ethical tension made explicit rather than smoothed over. Say what you advised and why, including what you got wrong or would do differently.

Then prepare to defend both. Read your reports aloud and ask yourself the obvious questions: why that control and not elimination? Was RIDDOR reportable here? What would you have done if consent had been refused? The viva rewards a candidate who has already argued with themselves.

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