Clinical assessment

If you qualified from medical school on or before 05 August 2024, you must take and pass the Clinical Assessment (CA) as a condition of your eligibility to apply to the Foundation Programme.

The purpose of the CA is to evaluate your fitness to begin work as a foundation doctor if you obtained your primary medical qualification more than two years prior to the start of the Foundation Programme.

Non-urgent advice: Important

There are no exceptions or exemptions. If you qualified from medical school on or before 05 August 2024, you must take and pass the Clinical Assessment (CA) as a condition of your eligibility to apply to the Foundation Programme, regardless of your citizenship, nationality, country of medical school, or GMC registration status. This is a requirement which forms part of the national person specification for entry to foundation training in the UK.

The UKFPO’s Clinical Assessments are conducted exclusively for the purpose of the eligibility application; therefore, alternative assessments are not accepted.

Description of the Clinical Assessment (CA)

The assessments will be delivered by Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. The team at Manchester has many years of experience of assessment and Clinical Competence Assessments (CCAs), from theoretical design, through evaluation to the practical provision of information to candidates. All candidates will sit a set of 12-station CCAs. Each station is 10 minutes long, including 1 minute of preparation time.

All candidates will sit this assessment in one session (approximately 4 hours). Instructions will be posted outside each station, giving clear guidance about the task to be performed at that station. In line with current practice, care will be taken to ensure accessibility and to avoid discrimination against candidates with disabilities or those whose first language is not English.

The assessment will differ from day to day but will be based on a similar format. Candidates sitting the assessment in the morning or afternoon will be ‘quarantined’ to ensure they cannot come into contact with each other. Candidates will be unable to use their mobile phones during this period.

Fees and payment

If you are required to complete the CA, you will be responsible for covering the full cost of £850 (GBP). The UKFPO is unable to provide financial support or offer any discount towards the Clinical Assessment fee.

The UKFPO will contact all eligible applicants who are required to take the Clinical Assessment with full instructions on how to make payment. Payments can be made immediately upon receipt of the email. Please do not attempt to make a payment before receiving the email instructions.

The payment window will close at 12:00 midday (BST) on 18 September 2025. If you do not make payment by this deadline, your application will be withdrawn from the process.

Assessment dates and venue

The assessments will take place on 03, 04, 05 and 06 November 2025. You will only be required to attend on one of these dates.

You will be allocated a specific date and time for the assessment, and will be notified of this on 06 October 2025. You will also be supplied with more detailed information, including directions to the venue.

The assessments take place at Wythenshawe Hospital and Oxford Road Campus, both of which are part of the Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. These venues have excellent facilities.

We can ensure that you are not allocated to sit the Clinical Assessment on the same day as your pre-booked PLAB exam. Please email helpdesk@foundationprogramme.nhs.uk to let us know if this might affect you. Please include your Oriel PIN, and evidence of your PLAB exam booking when contacting us.

If your PLAB 1 exam is booked for outside of the UK, you have options.

Option 1: Request to change venue and sit PLAB 1 in the UK instead 
You may wish to contact the GMC by emailing plab@gmc-uk.org to ask for priority access to available PLAB 1 places in the UK, and request to change the venue of your current booking. You must attach the email confirmation from Oriel to your PLAB booking request, to show that you have submitted an eligibility application to the UKFPO. The deadline to request a priority PLAB 1 test booking with the GMC is 31 August 2025. The GMC will no longer give priority to UKFP applicants who request a PLAB 1 booking after this date. Please note the UKFPO cannot guarantee availability of seats for PLAB, as this is managed by the GMC.

Option 2: Sit PLAB 1 outside of the UK, and request to be allocated to any other day for Clinical Assessment exam 
If you wish to keep your PLAB booking and sit PLAB 1 outside of the UK, we can ensure that you are not allocated to sit the Clinical Assessment on the same day. Please note that it is not possible to request a specific date for your Clinical Assessment – we are only able to ensure that you are not allocated to the same date as your PLAB exam. As you may be allocated any other date for Clinical Assessment, please bear this in mind and ensure that you plan travel arrangements accordingly if you choose to sit PLAB 1 outside of the UK.

Reasonable adjustments

Reasonable adjustments are practical changes to the delivery of the assessment, intended to reduce the impact of specific circumstances – such as a disability, health condition, or religious observance – without altering the standards or requirements of the assessment, or the score achieved by any candidate.

You may apply for reasonable adjustments on the following grounds:

– A long-standing learning disability
– A long-term or permanent physical disability, health condition or impairment
– Temporary health condition or impairment, or acute flare-up of a long-term health condition
– Other, for example, religious observance

If you wish to apply for reasonable adjustments, you must email helpdesk@foundationprogramme.nhs.uk with details and evidence of your requirements, by no later than 12:00 (midday, BST) on 18 September 2025.

Further information

These will be selected from the Wythenshawe Hospital’s pool of highly experienced simulated patients. All have undergone training in standardisation for CCAs and will be trained specifically for the roles within these assessments.

Candidates will be given a written report, analysing their performance on a station-by-station basis. As the stations are explicitly linked to many of the Foundation Programme curriculum competences of the Foundation Year 1 doctor, this will provide useful information for candidates on their strengths and weaknesses as they enter the Foundation Programme. Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust is working closely with their colleagues in the North West of England Foundation School to ensure that the questions authentically represent the current NHS working environment.

You will not be told your result on the day of your assessment.

You will receive the pass/fail result and comprehensive feedback by email.

Information about the appeals procedure will be available on the UKFPO website before the start date of the assessments.

Appeals will only be considered on procedural grounds (for example, failure to follow due process) and not on the academic or professional judgment of examiners.

Refer to the eligibility timeline for dates regarding Clinical Assessment appeals.

Frequently Asked Questions on Clinical Assessment can be found here.