FRCOphth Part 2 Written Paediatrics, Strabismus & Motility

The paediatric half runs from visual development and amblyopia through congenital cataract and glaucoma, retinopathy of prematurity and its screening, congenital nasolacrimal duct obstruction, juvenile idiopathic arthritis and paediatric uveitis, retinoblastoma, congenital nystagmus, and the leukocoria differential. Non-accidental injury sits here too and is examinable. The strabismus half covers the cover test and prism cover testing, concomitant against incomitant deviation, the esotropias and exotropias and how they are classified, A and V patterns, cranial nerve palsies, restrictive causes such as thyroid eye disease and orbital fracture, the named syndromes including Duane and Brown, and the management options from prisms and botulinum toxin through to surgical planning.

Paediatric stems tend to give an age, a presenting sign and a short history, then ask for the diagnosis or the immediate step. Age is usually doing real work in the stem rather than sitting there as background. Strabismus items are different in character: they hand you a set of measurements or a motility pattern and expect you to convert it into a mechanism. Reading that notation fluently is a separate skill from knowing the conditions, and it is the one candidates most often leave untrained.

Treat the two halves as two exercises. For the paediatric material, work scenario questions organised by presentation rather than by disease, so the differential forms the way it will in the exam. For strabismus, drill measurement and motility questions until interpreting them is automatic, then use the referenced explanations to confirm the mechanism behind each answer. The AI tutor is worth using here more than almost anywhere else, because a wrong answer in strabismus usually comes from one misread step rather than a gap in knowledge.