This blog post is about my experiences in appearing for the theory part of the medical license exam in Sweden.
Once you have learnt Swedish upto around SFI-D (between B1 and B2 levels, if you are following CEFR), I would suggest that you start going through the past years’ questions of the theory part of the medical license exam (kunskapsprov för läkare utanför EU). Details about learning Swedish has been explained in detail in my previous post. You can find the past questions here. It is likely that you don’t understand many terms, but you might be able to understand something at least. Medical vocabulary in Swedish is quite similar to that of English, so if you have understanding of Swedish grammar, learning medical terminology in Swedish would not take so much time.
To start with, you can translate the past questions to English in order to understand how tough it is. You can upload the pdf document to Google translate to get an English translation. My experience was that the theory exam in Sweden was easier than the post-graduate admission exam (NEET) in India. It is also less intensive in terms of having to memorize concepts. The medical license exam in Sweden focuses more on the basic concepts and practical applications of fundamental principles. This means that a good number of questions are case discussions, where you are asked to choose the most correct option about the diagnosis or management of a particular patient. Most often, the cases have typical signs and symptoms. Sometimes, the question only gives you hints about the patient’s symptoms, and ask you to choose a suitable treatment. In that case, it is upto you to work out the diagnosis first, consider the situation (if you are in primary care or tertiary care) given in the question and choose a diagnosis that is most appropriate for the situation. For example, the question might be about managing a patient who came with hemiparesis and slurred speech in primary care. First, you need to work out the diagnosis as stroke. Then, you need to consider that you are in primary care, and it is therefore not possible to manage the case in your hospital. The right answer would be to send the patient in an ambulance to the tertiary care hospital immediately. On the other hand, if the questions says that you are in a tertiary care, the option of doing thrombolysis might be the correct answer. In order to confuse you, both the options will be given to you. The key to cracking the exam is to visualize the situation in your mind, and then choose the option that sounds the most reasonable for you. Apply your common sense generously.
The theory exam consists of approximately 180 questions divided into three parts : a general part, a clinical part and interpreting a research article. The weightage of subjects can be found in this document. You can see in the document that medicine is the most important subject with 10% of the questions devoted to it. You will need to study pre-clinical subjects as well. I studied First Aid for the USMLE (Step 1) book for the pre-clinical part. This book is very condensed, so whenever I could not understand some concepts, I would look up my old textbooks to read elaborately about that topic. To some extent, Kaplan lecture notes for microbiology and pathology also helped, but I did not read them completely due to lack of time.
For the clinical part, I studied PLABABLE, the mobile app for preparing for the medical license exam in UK. As I was working full time while preparing for the exam, it was good to have the study material in mobile app format for me to study while I am traveling to work. I took longer to read Swedish text than English text, so PLABABLE was good for me since it was in English. In that way, I could grasp the concepts fast. I also subscribed to Hypocampus, but it had detailed descriptions for every disease, so I could not read much of it. There are differences in the ways by which diseases are managed in India and Sweden. In order to be mindful of these differences, I looked up the website internetmedicin to know the current Swedish guidelines. There is also a book and a mobile app called Läkemedelsboken that you can refer for the latest management protocols for common diseases in Sweden. These two resources are huge, so use them only as references. I also discovered two books from the library : Akut medicin and Akut kirurgi. These two books have condensed descriptions of commonly seen cases in Sweden. I used these two books for learning Swedish terms as well as for quick reference. There are similar ‘Akut’ books for orthopedics, radiology, psychiatry etc., but since these subjects were not as important for the exam as medicine and surgery, I did not read them. Sometimes, it was tiresome for me to study during the evening after a full day’s work, in which case I watched Osmosis videos passively while lying on the sofa.
I did not need to study for the research article part of the exam because my day job as a researcher helped me there. The most important parts of the research article are its aim and results (including tables). Make it a practice to read the questions first, and then read the relevant parts of the research article to find out the answer. If you instead read the article in full first, it is likely that you will not have sufficient time for answering the questions.
I think that the key to cracking the exam is to work out as many previously asked questions as possible. There is a lot of material out to study, and you can’t memorize all of them. You will need to prioritize some topics over the other, and you need to be familiar with past questions in order to know which topics are important. The previously asked questions do not repeat, but some subject areas are more frequently asked than others, so make a note of that by solving past question papers. All past questions can be found here. If you have time, solve past TULE and AT questions too. MCQs from Lund University are also in the same pattern as kunskapsprov, so practice them too. Whenever I solved past question papers, I looked up the concepts that I did not know and noted them in a notebook. I made it a practice to revise the contents of the notebook every three days or so.
Some people who were successful in the exam have watched videos on UmUplay (available on your moodle), participated in study-circles (find out if there is a study circle in your city) and attended the completion program for doctors educated outside of EU. I have not done any of these, and I studied alone. I studied only for two months or so, that too while working full time as a PhD candidate. But I had the habit of reading medical textbooks, popular science books and watching medicine related videos. Although I did this for fun, this habit helped me to keep my knowledge updated. Therefore, I did not need to study much for the exam. But even then, my first reaction after the exam day was that I would definitely fail. Fortunately for me, I passed the exam at the first attempt in May 2019. My score was 65.2%.
Earlier posts in this series:
Later posts in this series:
Blossoming Soul 
Hi Doctor,
Your posts are very informative and invaluable.Thank you for the effort and time.
I am working as a Pediatrician in Kerala .We are planning to relocate to Sweden.
What do you think is the best route for me? PhD or Master in public health
Hi Nirmala, I think that, if you can find a PhD position, that would be way better than starting with a Masters degree. Many concepts in PhD can be learnt on the go, and a Master’s degree is not always necessary. However, if you want to pursuse subjects where technical skills are needed (say PCR, cell culture), I recommed doing a Master’s first, learn the technique and then start the PhD. Good luck!