Preface

The need for Ukot’s Back to Basics MCQs: Mental Health, General Pediatrics, and Family Medicine, despite a plethora of standard textbooks in each of these specialties, is because, currently, there are relatively few books on multiple-choice questions (MCQs). It is easier for specialists to work as a team and produce a voluminous textbook in any of the numerous areas of Medicine than to single-handedly craft an MCQ book that has an appeal to a global reading audience.

Prior to the professional examinations in the medical school, a student should have and utilize a variety of good sources of MCQs to test the level of their understanding of lectures and the contents of textbooks in Mental Health, General Pediatrics, and Family Medicine that touch many angles of these specialties. Medical practitioners and other professionals who provide care in these specialties should regularly test themselves to ensure a proper transfer of knowledge to practice on patients and to maintain currency in theory and practice.

This book is designed to allow the reader to self-test on the principles and practical application of Mental Health, General Pediatrics, and Family Medicine. The contents are restricted to the foundational and common topics in these specialties. The contents are also selected to have a global appeal, ensuring that the student and medical practitioner in developed countries find clinical correlates with their study and practice environment, while their counterparts in the developing countries also find conditions in their practice setting; moreover, this book ensures that each set of readers learns from what applies to the other.

The book is designed to be relatively small in size; the rationale is to make it depart from the usual much more voluminous text and thus make it easy for a medical student, medical practitioner, and other healthcare professionals who provide services in these specialties to carry the physical book in their clinical coat pockets. This book contains a good mix of theory and practice that aims at ensuring a good understanding of health challenges and rendering appropriate and safe service to patients. The e-book is also a veritable resource.