Master the Path to Canadian Practice
Ethics for MCCQE and NAC
Path to Practice Series, Vol 2
The Canadian rules you weren’t taught.
Ethics is where IMGs lose marks they should not be losing. Not because they don’t know medicine, but because the rules they bring into the exam room are from the wrong jurisdiction.
This guide rebuilds your ethical reasoning for the Canadian context.
♦ 20 testable topics, organized by what the exam is actually asking
♦ “Where Candidates Frequently Go Wrong” callouts in every chapter
♦ Built for both MCCQE Part 1 and NAC ethics stations
$65 CAD | Digital, 7×10 PDF | Instant download
NAC: A Complete Strategy Guide
Path to Practice Series, Vol 1
The NAC is harder than it looks.
Most IMGs prepare for the NAC like it is a knowledge test. It is not. It is a performance exam, scored by Canadian examiners watching for specific cues that most international training never teaches. This guide covers all of them.
♦ Frameworks for every part of the encounter: history, physical, communication, and clinical reasoning
♦ Station archetypes decoded, with the cues that tell you what is being tested
♦ The 7 failure patterns that quietly cost knowledgeable IMGs their pass
$89.99 CAD | Digital, 7×10 PDF | Instant download
The 100-Day NAC Study Plan
Path to Practice Series, Vol 3
Stop deciding what to study every morning.
Most IMGs preparing for the NAC already have the materials. What they don’t have is a plan. This is 100 days of structured preparation, built on the learning science that actually moves a candidate from knowing medicine to performing it under exam conditions.
♦ 100 daily sessions across 5 phases, with 9 session templates that handle every kind of day
♦ Built on spaced repetition, interleaving, active recall, and tiered topic prioritisation
♦ Pairs with the NAC Strategy Guide, Toronto Notes, the OSCE Handbook, and OSLER AI
$89 CAD | Digital, 7×10 PDF | Instant download
NAC Preparation Bundle
One framework. Three layers. Complete preparation.
Ethics teaches the rules. The NAC Guide teaches the performance. The 100-Day Study Plan runs
the daily schedule. Buying the three together is how the series was designed to be used.
♦ All three guides, instant download
♦ Saves $44.99 vs. buying separately
$199 CAD bundle | Digital | Instant download
Ethics for MCCQE and NAC
Path to Practice Series, Vol 2
The Canadian rules uou weren’t taught.
Every physician who sits the MCCQE or the NAC already knows medicine. The problem is
different. Canadian medicine operates inside a specific cultural, legal, and institutional
framework that most international training does not include.
The MCC is not asking whether you know patients can refuse treatment. It is asking what
happens next in Canada when they do. Who has authority if the patient loses capacity. What you
must report, to whom, and under which statute. Whether a disclosure is mandatory or
discretionary. These are Canadian rules. If you trained somewhere else, the answers you bring to
the exam may be wrong.
What’s inside
A framework that mirrors how the exam thinks. MCC ethics scenarios fall into three distinct
cognitive demands. Some scenarios ask you to apply a rule. Some ask you to reason through a
tension between two principles. Some ask you to recognize that the rules alone are not enough,
and that the patient’s identity or social position is the clinical data.
The 20 topics in this guide are
organized around those three demands.
Part 1: Apply the Rule. Nine foundational topics: the Four Principles and the CMA Code,
Professionalism, Patient Safety and Disclosure, Consent, Capacity and the SDM Hierarchy,
Confidentiality, Truth-telling, Research Ethics, and the Canadian Healthcare System.
Part 2: Reason Through the Tension. Six high-stakes topics where rules collide: Mandatory
Reporting, End-of-Life and MAID, Conscientious Objection, Reproductive and Adolescent
Ethics, Involuntary Psychiatric Care, and Legal Obligations and Public Safety.
Part 3: Recognize the Context. Five MCC-mandated topics that test whether you see the
structural layer: Indigenous Health, Anti-Oppressive Care, 2SLGBTQQIA+ Health, the Social
Determinants of Health, and Substance Use and Harm Reduction.
“Where Candidates Frequently Go Wrong” in every chapter. Each topic flags the specific
points where international training is most likely to lead you to the wrong Canadian answer, with
the corrected reasoning laid out clearly.
This is for you if;
♦ You’re preparing for the MCCQE Part 1, the NAC, or both
♦ You trained outside Canada and need a single source for Canadian medical ethics
♦ You’ve been piecing ethics together from CMPA advisories, the CMA Code, MCC
objectives, and provincial legislation, and you want it consolidated.
About the author
Dr. Filipe Santos is an anesthesiologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto,
where he teaches medical students and residents. He is the author of the Path to Practice Series.
Format: Digital PDF, 7×10 Access: Instant download after purchase Price: $65 CAD
NAC: A Complete Strategy Guide
Path to Practice Series, Vol 1
The NAC is harder than it looks.
The NAC is a performance exam dressed up as a clinical exam. That single fact is the reason most
IMGs underestimate it. You can know the medicine, walk in confident, and still leak points across
the encounter for reasons that have nothing to do with your clinical knowledge.
A few of those reasons:
♦ Time runs out before the plan is delivered
♦ Reasoning is structured the way it is in the candidate’s home country, not the way Canadian
examiners are scoring
♦ The candidate opens well, then loses points the moment the patient gets upset, confused, or
discloses something hard
♦ The social context is treated as a footnote, when in Canada it is a scoring domain
♦ The candidate knows the diagnosis but cannot present it the way the rating scale is asking for
This guide is built around those gaps. It does not teach medicine. It teaches the specific way a
Canadian OSCE has to be performed and scored, and it gives you a framework for every
component of an encounter so nothing is left to chance on the day.
What’s inside;
The 4-Step History Framework. Define, Explore, Zoom Out, Check In. A repeatable structure for
taking a focused, scorable history under time pressure, with specialty variants for psychiatry,
obstetrics, and pediatrics.
The Narration Framework for physical examination. What to say out loud, when to say it, and
how to translate every manoeuvre into the language examiners are listening for. Includes
worked narration examples for the major systems.
SPIKES and PEARLS for communication stations. The two communication frameworks
Canadian examiners expect you to know, plus a library of sample phrases for every stage of an
encounter, including the difficult conversations that decide pass or fail.
The IDEA structure for diagnosis and management. Impression, Differential, Evidence, Action.
How to present clinical reasoning in a way that earns marks across the differential, the
investigations, and the management plan, even when you are uncertain.
Station archetypes, decoded. A breakdown of the major NAC station types, including the “How
to recognize this station” cues that tell you, in real time, what is actually being tested.
The 7 failure patterns. A direct analysis of the most common habits that quietly cost
knowledgeable IMGs their pass, with the specific corrections for each.
The scoring lens, explained. How examiners weight the three core domains and the seven
competencies, and where international candidates predictably leak points.
A curated video library. A hand-reviewed library of free videos for every major NAC topic,
organized first by discipline (PHELO, Psychiatry, Internal Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics and
Gynecology, Pediatrics) and then by skill (history taking, communication, physical examination,
investigations). Every entry is a direct link to a free resource on YouTube or an academic site
(Boston University, Stanford, and others), so you can move from a topic to a video without
searching for it.
A reviewed list of NAC study resources. Honest reviews of Toronto Notes, the Edmonton
Manual, the OSCE Handbook, OSLER AI, and Master The NAC, with guidance on what each is
and is not good for.
This is for you if
♦ You are preparing for the NAC OSCE and want a written strategy guide, not a video course
♦ You trained outside Canada and need to bridge the gap to Canadian clinical expectations
♦ You want one reference that covers structure, scoring, frameworks, and resources in one place.
Best paired with
The 100-Day NAC Study Plan (the day-by-day execution plan built around this guide), Toronto
Notes, the Edmonton Manual, the OSCE Handbook, OSLER AI for scenario practice, and any
clinical reference you already use. The Strategy Guide is the framework layer. Your clinical
references are the content layer. Used together, the two cover everything the NAC tests.
About the author
Dr. Filipe Santos is an anesthesiologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto,
where he teaches medical students and residents. He is the author of the Path to Practice Series.
Format: Digital PDF, 7×10 Access: Instant download after purchase
Price: $89.99 CAD
The 100-Day NAC Study Plan
Path to Practice Series, Vol 3
Stop deciding what to study every morning.
Most IMGs preparing for the NAC are not short on materials. They have Toronto Notes. They
have OSLER AI. They may have the OSCE Handbook and the Edmonton Manual on the shelf.
What they don’t have is a plan, and so every morning starts with the same question and the same
lost time: what am I doing today?
This is the answer. 100 daily sessions, structured into 5 phases, with the priorities and the
rotation already decided for you. You open the page, you do the work, you close the day.
The decisions are already made.
Built on the learning science that actually works
The plan is not a list of topics laid out in order. It is a deliberate application of the learning
techniques that decades of cognitive research have shown to outperform passive review:
♦ Spaced repetition. Topics return at calibrated intervals, not on the days they were first
studied, so material is encoded into long-term memory rather than crammed.
♦ Interleaving. Disciplines and station types are mixed across the rotation rather than
blocked together, which is how the exam itself presents material and how the brain best
learns to discriminate between similar problems.
♦ Active recall. Every standard day opens with a brain dump, where you reconstruct what
you remember from memory before opening any reference. This is the single most
evidence-based study technique in cognitive science.
♦ Tiered prioritisation. Every topic in the plan is tagged by tier so the highest-yield material
gets the most repetitions across the 100 days. The mixing is built into the schedule itself, so
you don’t have to design it.
♦ Reflection. Every day closes with prompts that surface recurring weak spots and feed
directly into the next spaced review
What’s inside
100 daily session cards. Each day specifies the template, the discipline, the topic, the tier, and
the resources to use. No daily decisions. Open the page and execute.
5 phases with deliberate pacing. Foundations, Momentum, Pivot, Integration, and Command.
Each phase has a different purpose, and the workload is calibrated so you arrive at the exam
having peaked, not burned out.
9 session templates that handle every type of day. T1 for most clinical content. T2 for psychiatry
with the MSE. T4 for physical examination. T5 for behavioural counselling. T6 for breaking bad
news. T7 for mock exam. T8 for spaced review. The structure is decided once and reused.
The OPENER framework. The six-step encounter structure used in almost every station, with
deliberate cues for which letter matters most for that station type. Practice blocks throughout the
plan are built around it.
The REVISE framework for spaced review. A six-step recall structure used on every spaced
review day, designed to surface where your understanding actually breaks down, not just where
it feels shaky.
A built-in mock exam progression. Six full mock exams structured into Phase 5 (Command),
with reflection windows around each one so you turn each mock into a diagnostic, not just a
stress test.
This is for you if
♦ You are preparing for the NAC and want the structure handled for you
♦ You learn better against a deadline and a daily session than from open-ended study
♦ You are willing to use evidence-based techniques even when they feel less comfortable
than re-reading
How to use it
The plan is 100 days, paced however you decide. Most candidates run it as 100 consecutive days.
Some take a recovery day each week. Some stretch it across longer windows. The plan does not
stipulate when you study, only what to study and how the day is structured.
Best paired with
The NAC Strategy Guide (referenced on most content days for the frameworks), Toronto Notes,
the OSCE Handbook, the Edmonton Manual, and Bates’ Guide to Physical Examination on
selected days. OSLER AI is optional but highly recommended for the practice blocks. The plan
tells you when to use each resource.
About the author
Dr. Filipe Santos is an anesthesiologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto,
where he teaches medical students and residents. He is the author of the Path to Practice Series.
Format: Digital PDF, 7×10 Access: Instant download after purchase Price: $89 CAD
The Path to Practice Bundle
One framework. Three layers. Complete preparation.
Most IMGs preparing for the MCCQE or the NAC are juggling three problems at once. They do
not know the Canadian ethical framework. They have not been taught how to perform inside a
Canadian OSCE. And they do not have a daily schedule to put their preparation on. Each guide in
the Path to Practice Series solves one of those problems.
How the three guides work together
Ethics for MCCQE and NAC. The rules layer. The Canadian ethical and legal framework, with
explicit callouts for where international training conflicts with Canadian standards. Used for
MCCQE Part 1 ethics questions and NAC ethics stations.
NAC: A Complete Strategy Guide. The performance layer. Frameworks for history taking,
physical examination narration, communication, and clinical reasoning. The reference text
behind every encounter.
The 100-Day NAC Study Plan. The execution layer. The day-by-day plan that decides what to
study, when to practise, and how to revise. Built on the NAC Guide’s frameworks.
Why bundle
The 100-Day Study Plan references the NAC Guide on most content days. The NAC Guide
assumes the ethics topics are covered separately. The three guides were built to be used together,
and the bundle reflects that.
What you get
All three digital PDFs, delivered instantly after purchase. Same digital files, same instant access.
$199 CAD total, which saves you $44.99 off the individual prices.