Your field of practice now shapes what you see
You book the CBT under a field of practice, and the paper you sit is not quite the paper the person beside you sits. Most of the clinical half is common to all four fields and about a tenth of it is specific to yours. Until this month we ignored that and showed everybody everything, so an adult nurse worked through questions about a child's fluid requirements and a mental health nurse revised things nobody is going to ask them.
You now choose your field when you set up your account, and you can change it on your profile page afterwards. Practice, mocks and the OSCE stations all follow it. A question written for another field stops appearing and a station written for another field is not offered.
The four are adult nursing, mental health nursing, learning disabilities nursing and children's nursing, which are the four fields the NMC registers nurses in and the four you can choose between when you book. Midwives sit a separate test of competence, so it is not on the list here.
What made this more than a filter was what it did to the mocks, and it is a good example of why we measure things rather than reasoning about them. Switching the filter on cut an adult nurse's worst case from five consecutive mock papers to two. The field-specific questions had quietly been holding up cells that are supposed to be common ground, so taking them out of most accounts exposed how thin those cells really were. The filter came out again the same day it went in.
The fix was seventy new questions written to be common to all four fields, each one aimed at a cell the measurement named, and then a re-run to check the fix rather than assume it. Every field now reaches the same number of consecutive papers as the whole bank does, which is the condition for the filter staying on. It is also a condition we have to re-check after every batch of authoring, because the limit is combinatorial and does not reliably improve just because the bank got bigger.
On the OSCE side there are forty-eight stations, and every field has a complete set: the four scenario stations that make up one patient's assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation, plus a professional values station and an evidence based practice station. Adult nursing has seven different scenarios to choose between, because that is where most candidates are.
If your account is older than this week it was set to adult nursing, which is the commonest, so it is worth checking before your next mock. It takes two taps to change and everything follows it. Which parts of the exam are field-specific explains what does and does not change with the field you pick.