The national certifying exams are designed to assess entry level competences for graduates of HIM certified programs. It assesses your knowledge of areas including disease management, health promotion, disease prevention and diagnosis. It’s crucial if you’re going to become a practicing CRNA so it is only natural to want to prepare for it in the best way possible.

Getting some help

There are a number of organisations set up to help. For example, you may be looking for some help with your Anesthesia Board Review Course, in which case they can provide guidance and help. Some, such as Valley Anesthesia offer a series of guides and review courses which can show you where you are, and how much more you have to do to pass the exam. By doing so they have helped 30,000 students pass the NCE so far and say they will waive the enrolment fee for another review course if a student doesn’t pass first time.

The study guides are intended to help students prepare for what’s to come. They can have sample questions which aid with memorisation and will help you retain anesthesia related facts. Each section can be grouped into sub-categories to make it easier to learn as you go.

Sample exams

Some providers offer the chance to sit a sample paper. These effectively give you the chance to take a dry run without the stress of doing the exam for real. Not only can they help you to assess your level, but they can also provide a confidence boost. Even if you are in good shape to pass, they can boost your score. We tend to perform better at tasks once we’ve repeated them. So, if you took the NCE exam once, the chances are you’d score higher if you took it again. Having a practice swing increases your chances of having that better second score as your official result.

Making your choice

The biggest problem when choosing a provider is the sheer level of choice at your disposal. A quick search on the internet reveals a host of companies offering services to help you through the NCE – and inevitably some will be better than others. Each will make bold claims about their results and will probably have a page full of positive reviews from past customers.

However, there is no guarantee that these reviews are representative of the overall experience or even that they are real. To get an accurate overall impression, you need to search for a provider’s name on the internet. We have become much more savvy as consumers. If we get good service we like to say so on the web, but equally if we feel we’ve been short changed we’ll be vocal. We’ll share our dissatisfaction publicly to help other people to avoid making the same mistake.

In short the more research you do into a provider the better your chances of finding one who can do what they claim.