EDAIC Part 2 Viva Topics and Sample Questions

If you have passed Part 1 and are now staring down the structured oral examination, the question on every trainee's mind is simple: what will they actually ask me? This guide maps the recurring edaic part 2 viva topics by station so you can revise with purpose rather than panic, and it shows you how to turn what you know into a structured, confident spoken answer. The sample stems below are illustrative teaching examples in the style of the exam — they are not leaked papers, and the EDAIC question pool is confidential.

The Part 2 exam (Part II) is a structured oral examination, taken after you pass the Part 1 written papers. It is a viva: examiners ask guided clinical and basic-science questions, and you reply out loud. The skill being tested is not just recall but applied reasoning under mild time pressure — exactly the thing a question bank and a study plan train into you, but spoken.

How the Part 2 SOE is structured

The structured oral examination is built around a small number of timed stations, split broadly into two families:

• Basic science applied to anaesthesia — applied physiology, pharmacology, anatomy, and physics with clinical measurement.
• Clinical anaesthesia — perioperative management, critical care, and crisis or emergency scenarios.

Each station is "structured": the examiners work from a defined question set, give every candidate broadly comparable prompts, and mark against a standard rather than ranking you against the room. That criterion-referenced philosophy is the same one used in Part 1, and it has a practical consequence for the viva — there is no fixed quota of passes, so you are competing against a standard of competence, not against the other candidates in your cohort.

Part 2 is generally conducted in English, regardless of which language you sat Part 1 in. For confirmed structural detail, station counts, and timings, always check the official ESAIC/EDAIC site and our companion piece on the Part 2 oral exam SOE structure. For the precise current dates and centres, see the Part 2 dates, centres and deadlines guide — figures change cycle to cycle, so treat the official site as the source of truth.

Edaic part 2 viva topics on the basic-science side

The basic-science stations reward candidates who can take a single physiological or pharmacological principle and apply it to a patient in front of them. Examiners rarely want a textbook recitation; they want to see you reason from first principles to a clinical decision.

Applied physiology

This is the backbone of the basic-science viva. Expect cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, and neurophysiology, almost always framed clinically.

Recurring themes:

• Oxygen delivery and the oxyhaemoglobin dissociation curve — what shifts it, and why it matters during sepsis or a difficult intubation.
• Control of cardiac output, preload and afterload, and the Frank–Starling relationship applied to the shocked patient.
• Respiratory mechanics, dead space, shunt, and the alveolar gas equation.
• Cerebral blood flow autoregulation and intracranial pressure.
• Acid–base balance and the approach to a blood gas.

Illustrative SOE-style stems:

• "A patient's SpO₂ falls to 88% in recovery. Talk me through the physiological causes you would consider."
• "Draw and explain the oxyhaemoglobin dissociation curve. What would shift it to the right, and what is the clinical relevance?"
• "How does the body compensate for an acute metabolic acidosis?"

To go deeper on the curated list of topics that repay revision, see our high-yield physiology topics for EDAIC.

Pharmacology

The pharmacology station loves anything with a graph or a number you can reason about: dose–response, pharmacokinetics, and the behaviour of drugs you use every day.

Recurring themes:

• Context-sensitive half-time and why a remifentanil infusion behaves so differently from a long propofol infusion. As a revision pointer, remifentanil's context-sensitive half-time stays short (in the order of a few minutes) almost regardless of infusion duration because of rapid ester hydrolysis — a favourite illustration of why elimination half-life alone misleads.
• Mechanism, onset, and offset of induction agents, neuromuscular blockers, and reversal agents.
• Local anaesthetic pharmacology, maximum safe doses, and the management of local anaesthetic systemic toxicity (LAST).
• Volatile agents: MAC, the concept of partition coefficients, and what drives speed of induction.
• Inotropes and vasopressors at the receptor level.

Illustrative SOE-style stems:

• "What is context-sensitive half-time, and how does it influence your choice of opioid for a long case?"
• "A patient develops perioral tingling and then a seizure during an axillary block. What is your management?" (For LAST, the standard revision answer runs: stop injecting, call for help, manage airway and oxygenation, control seizures, and give intravenous lipid emulsion per current guidelines — always follow your local and current published protocol in practice.)
• "Compare suxamethonium and rocuronium for rapid sequence induction."

Pharmacology is dense, and most candidates underestimate how much spaced revision it needs — our high-yield pharmacology topics and the spaced-repetition memory method together solve that problem.

Anatomy

Anatomy in the viva is almost always applied: the structures you need to perform a block, secure an airway, or insert a line.

Recurring themes:

• Airway anatomy from the nasal cavity to the carina, and the anatomy of cricothyroidotomy.
• The brachial plexus and the landmarks for common regional techniques.
• The vertebral column, epidural and subarachnoid spaces, and the anatomy of neuraxial blockade.
• Central venous access anatomy and the structures at risk.

Illustrative SOE-style stems:

• "Describe the anatomy relevant to performing an interscalene brachial plexus block. What complications follow from that anatomy?"
• "Identify the cricothyroid membrane and describe how you would perform an emergency front-of-neck airway."

Physics and clinical measurement

This station catches candidates who can use a monitor but cannot explain it. Examiners probe how a measurement is actually made and where it fails.

Recurring themes:

• Pulse oximetry: the principle, and its limitations (carboxyhaemoglobin, methaemoglobin, motion, poor perfusion).
• Capnography waveform interpretation.
• Invasive and non-invasive blood pressure measurement, damping, and resonance.
• Temperature measurement, humidity, and the gas laws applied to cylinders and flowmeters.
• Electrical safety and diathermy.

Illustrative SOE-style stems:

• "How does a pulse oximeter work, and in what situations will it read inaccurately?"
• "Interpret this capnography trace for me." (Expect an abnormal waveform — a slanted upstroke, a rising baseline, or cardiac oscillations.)

This is one of the most learnable stations because the content is finite and rule-based. Work through our physics and clinical measurement high-yield guide until the explanations come out automatically. It also overlaps heavily with the basic-science material in the Part 1 syllabus breakdown, so revising one reinforces the other.

Edaic clinical viva topics: anaesthesia, critical care and crises

The clinical stations are where examiners watch you behave like a safe consultant-in-the-making. The questions are deliberately open at first — "this patient is coming for surgery, how do you proceed?" — and then narrow as the examiner introduces complications.

Clinical anaesthesia

The bread and butter: a patient, a procedure, a comorbidity, and a plan.

Recurring themes:

• Preoperative assessment and optimisation of the patient with cardiac, respiratory, or endocrine disease.
• The full airway management pathway, including the unanticipated difficult airway.
• Regional versus general anaesthesia trade-offs for a given operation.
• Obstetric, paediatric, and day-case anaesthesia.
• Postoperative complications and analgesia.

Illustrative SOE-style stems:

• "A 70-year-old with aortic stenosis presents for a hip replacement. Talk me through your anaesthetic plan."
• "You cannot intubate and you cannot ventilate. What do you do?" (The standard revision framework follows a published difficult-airway algorithm: declare the emergency, optimise oxygenation through supraglottic and face-mask attempts, and move without delay to emergency front-of-neck access — follow your current local difficult-airway guideline in practice.)

Critical care

Intensive care is examined both as its own domain and as the downstream consequence of an anaesthetic problem.

Recurring themes:

• Management of sepsis and the haemodynamically unstable patient.
• Mechanical ventilation strategies, including lung-protective ventilation in ARDS.
• Acute kidney injury and renal replacement therapy.
• Sedation, delirium, and nutrition in the ICU.
• Brainstem death testing and the principles around organ donation.

Illustrative SOE-style stems:

• "A ventilated patient with ARDS is becoming hypoxic. How do you approach this?"
• "Outline your initial resuscitation of a patient with septic shock."

The intensive care content overlaps directly with Paper B at Part 1, so if your ICU knowledge feels thin, the intensive care and Paper B guide is the fastest way to shore it up before the viva.

Crisis and emergency scenarios

These stations test the calm, systematic you. The clinical detail matters, but examiners are equally interested in your structure: do you call for help, allocate tasks, and treat the patient and the cause in parallel?

Recurring themes:

• Anaphylaxis under anaesthesia.
• Malignant hyperthermia.
• Massive haemorrhage and major transfusion.
• Cardiac arrest in theatre and the reversible causes.
• The unwell patient on the ward whom you are called to assess.

Illustrative SOE-style stems:

• "Ten minutes into an operation the patient becomes profoundly hypotensive with a rising airway pressure and a rash. What is happening and what do you do?"
• "Describe your management of suspected malignant hyperthermia."

How to structure a spoken answer

Knowing the edaic soe questions is only half the battle; the candidates who pass are the ones who answer in a structure the examiner can follow.

A reliable scaffold:

1. Frame it. Restate the problem in one sentence and signal your approach: "This is a peri-arrest anaesthetic emergency; I'll manage it with a structured ABC approach while looking for the cause."
2. Prioritise safety first. Get help, give oxygen, secure the airway — say the safe, obvious things before the clever things.
3. Classify, then list. When asked "what are the causes of X", offer a classification (pre-/intra-/post-, or by system) and then populate it. Structure signals competence.
4. Commit to a plan. Examiners want a decision. Give one, then justify it.
5. Acknowledge limits. Referencing current guidelines and saying "I would follow my local protocol" reads as mature, not evasive.

A short comparison of the two answer styles examiners see most often:

The single biggest avoidable failure mode is silence followed by an unstructured ramble. Practising out loud — ideally with a colleague playing examiner — converts written knowledge into spoken fluency. Our roundup of common mistakes that fail EDAIC candidates is worth a read precisely because most of those mistakes are about delivery, not knowledge.

Turning these topics into a revision plan

You cannot revise everything to the same depth, so triage. A workable approach in the final weeks:

• Build a one-page checklist of the station themes above and rate yourself red/amber/green on each.
• Convert your weak topics into spoken drills: set a two-minute timer and explain each to an empty room or a study partner.
• Use a question bank to keep the underlying facts sharp — recall under retrieval pressure is the same muscle the viva tests. See how to use an EDAIC question bank effectively.
• In the last stretch, follow a structured final-month revision plan so you arrive rehearsed, not just read.

If you are still working towards Part 1, sequence your effort sensibly: the basic-science foundations you build for the written exam are exactly what the viva reuses. Our effective study plan for the EDAIC shows how to stage it.

Frequently asked questions

Are these the real EDAIC Part 2 questions?

No. Every stem here is an illustrative teaching example written in the style of the exam. The EDAIC question pool is confidential, and these are edaic part 2 sample questions for revision only — they are not past papers. Use them to rehearse structure and reasoning, not to memorise "answers".

What topics come up most in the Part 2 viva?

Across cycles, the recurring edaic clinical viva topics cluster around applied physiology and pharmacology on the basic-science side, and airway management, critical care, and theatre crises on the clinical side. The exact stations and weighting are set by ESAIC and can change, so confirm current details on the official EDAIC website.

Is the Part 2 exam in English?

Yes — the structured oral examination is generally conducted in English, even though the Part 1 written exam is offered in several European languages. If English is not your first language, practising your answers out loud matters even more.

How is the Part 2 marked?

Like Part 1, standard-setting is criterion-referenced: you are judged against a defined standard of competence, not ranked against the other candidates. For how the pass mark is determined, see our pass rate and pass mark explainer.

How is the EDAIC viva different from the FRCA?

The EDAIC is the pan-European diploma awarded by ESAIC, while the FRCA is the separate UK qualification of the Royal College of Anaesthetists, with its own structured oral exams. They are broadly comparable in level but are different qualifications with different awarding bodies — our EDAIC vs FRCA comparison breaks down which suits your career.

Ready to turn these topics into fluent, structured answers? Create a free AnesCORE account to start practising, and drill the underlying basic science and clinical knowledge with our EDAIC question bank so that when the examiner asks "talk me through this", the structure is already in your head.