Do I need to buy Therapeutic Guidelines or other Australian resources to pass AMC Part 1?

No. The AMC's own free publication, Australian Medicine in Context, forms the core exam framework. Guidelines like Therapeutic Guidelines and the RACGP Red Book add depth for management-style questions, but they are supplementary, not mandatory purchases.

Which Australian guideline is most important for AMC Part 1?

There is no single most important one. The AMC's own MCQ Examination Specifications name Therapeutic Guidelines and the RACGP guidelines (Red Book, Green Book, SNAP, National Guide, Silver Book, White Book) as useful for understanding Australian practice standards.

Should I use UpToDate or NICE guidelines instead of Australian ones?

International resources are fine for background reading, but AMC Part 1 tests Australian-specific practice. Immunisation schedules, screening intervals, and first-line prescribing choices can differ from UK or US guidance. Prioritise Australian sources for anything guideline-specific.

Where can I find ANZCOR and ASCIA guidelines, and are they official AMC resources?

ANZCOR (anzcor.org) publishes Australia and New Zealand's resuscitation guidelines, and ASCIA (allergy.org.au) publishes the anaphylaxis management guidelines. Both are free and authoritative, but neither is explicitly named in the AMC's own examination specifications. They are independently verified, high-value resources for emergency content.

What is the difference between Therapeutic Guidelines and the Australian Medicines Handbook (AMH)?

Therapeutic Guidelines is organised by condition or clinical problem and gives a recommended treatment approach. AMH is organised by drug or drug class and gives detailed monographs (dosing, interactions, adverse effects). It is the Australian equivalent of the British National Formulary. The two are complementary rather than interchangeable.

Australian Clinical Guidelines for AMC Part 1

If your medical training happened outside Australia, one of the least obvious adjustments for AMC Part 1 is not clinical knowledge — it is which guidelines that knowledge should be anchored to. A management decision that is correct under NICE, UpToDate, or your home country's protocols is not automatically correct on the AMC exam, because AMC Part 1 tests Australian clinical practice specifically.

This article breaks down every Australian clinical guideline relevant to AMC Part 1 preparation into three tiers: guidelines the AMC's own specifications name, guidelines that aren't named but are essential anyway, and guidelines to use with caution, with a source and a short explanation for each.

Why Australian-Specific Guidelines Matter

AMC Part 1 questions are clinical vignettes that test Management decisions as much as diagnosis: drug choice, referral pathways, screening intervals, counselling. The AMC's own framework document, Australian Medicine in Context, covers 105 common conditions and 56 professional practice topics, but it is a condensed reference, not a full clinical guideline. For the depth behind many management questions (why this drug first, when to refer, how often to screen), the AMC points candidates toward Australia's actual clinical guidelines. See the Exam Guide for how these resources fit into overall preparation.

This matters most for candidates whose training was in a health system with different first-line choices, different immunisation schedules, or different screening programs. A drug or interval that is standard practice elsewhere may not be the "single best answer" the AMC is looking for.

Guidelines Named in the AMC Specifications

The AMC's MCQ Examination Specifications document names the following Australian guideline resources directly, alongside general references like UpToDate, BMJ Best Practice, and Medscape (which are useful for background but are not Australia-specific, so they are not detailed here). These are the guidelines to prioritise if you are choosing where to spend limited reading time.

Source: AMC MCQ Examination Specifications (candidate guidelines and specifications document). Check amc.org.au/examination-specifications for the current edition, as the AMC periodically reissues this document.

Therapeutic Guidelines

tg.org.au is Australia's independent, not-for-profit reference for medicine use, covering 22 guideline topics, 2,500+ clinical topics, and 5,000+ drug recommendations. The AMC specifications describe it as addressing "current recommendations on use of medicines in Australia." It is organised by condition (e.g. "community-acquired pneumonia" or "hypertension"), so it is the natural first stop when a management question asks what to do for a given presentation. Subscription-based, though many Australian hospital and university libraries provide free access.

RACGP Guidelines

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners publishes a family of guidelines at racgp.org.au, which the AMC specifications describe as providing "useful information on Australian practice." Six specific publications are named:

Red Book: Guidelines for preventive activities in general practice (10th edition, 2024). The main Australian reference for screening and preventive care, including cancer screening intervals, cardiovascular risk assessment, immunisation review, and lifestyle risk screening.
Green Book: Putting Prevention Into Practice. A practical companion to the Red Book, covering how preventive activities are implemented in general practice rather than what they are.
SNAP: Smoking, Nutrition, Alcohol, Physical activity: A population health guide to behavioural risk factors in general practice. Covers brief intervention approaches for the four major modifiable lifestyle risk factors.
National Guide: National guide to a preventive health assessment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. A companion to the Red Book focused specifically on preventive assessment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients.
Silver Book: RACGP Aged Care Clinical Guide. Clinical and organisational guidance for managing older patients, including in residential aged care.
White Book: Abuse and violence: Working with our patients in general practice. Identification of and response to family violence and abuse.

Australian Immunisation Handbook

immunisationhandbook.health.gov.au is the official national clinical guideline for vaccine use, developed by ATAGI (Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation) and endorsed by the NHMRC. Free and publicly available. Named directly in the AMC specifications for immunisation content, this is the source for the Australian National Immunisation Program schedule, contraindications, and catch-up schedules.

RCH Clinical Practice Guidelines

rch.org.au hosts the Royal Children's Hospital (Melbourne) Clinical Practice Guidelines, named directly in the AMC specifications for paediatric content. Free and organised by presenting problem (e.g. "febrile child," "bronchiolitis"), which maps well onto how Child Health questions are typically framed.

RANZCP

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists publishes "clinical guidelines and publications," named by the AMC for mental health content. These cover diagnosis and management approaches for conditions like depression, bipolar disorder, and psychosis in the Australian context.

RANZCOG and the Pregnancy Care Guidelines

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists publishes statements and guidelines at ranzcog.edu.au, named by the AMC for women's health content. Alongside these, the Australian Government-funded Pregnancy Care Guidelines (now maintained as living guidelines by the Australian Living Evidence Collaboration) set the national standard for routine antenatal care: screening tests, timing of visits, and risk assessment through pregnancy.

How These Map to the AMC Part 1 Syllabus

Each patient group in the syllabus draws on a different subset of the guidelines above:

The Green Book and Silver Book do not map to one specific patient group. The Green Book supports how preventive care is implemented across general practice scenarios generally, and the Silver Book is most relevant wherever a vignette involves an older or residential aged care patient, which can appear across several patient groups.

Guidelines Not in the AMC Specifications, But Essential

Some high-yield areas are tested on AMC Part 1 but are not explicitly named in the AMC's specifications document, especially emergency management (resuscitation, anaphylaxis) and drug-level prescribing detail. For these, the following are the actual Australian authorities, independently verified against each organisation's own site:

ANZCOR (Australian and New Zealand Committee on Resuscitation), anzcor.org: the official body for Basic Life Support, Adult/Paediatric Advanced Life Support, Newborn Resuscitation, and anaphylaxis flowcharts. Free.
ASCIA (Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy), allergy.org.au: publishes the official Acute Management of Anaphylaxis guideline used by Australian clinicians. Free.
Australian Medicines Handbook (AMH), amh.net.au: a drug-by-drug reference (as opposed to Therapeutic Guidelines' condition-by-condition structure), jointly produced by RACGP, the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, and ASCEPT. Useful alongside pharmacology revision for dosing, interactions, and adverse effects.

If a scenario involves cardiac arrest algorithms, anaphylaxis management, or a specific drug choice, these are the Australian sources the "single best answer" is typically drawn from — not a generic international protocol.

Guidelines to Use With Caution

Some resources are commonly recommended by other exam preparation services, but are not named in the AMC's own specifications document. They are legitimate, official Australian organisations, just not confirmed as AMC-endorsed reading:

National Heart Foundation of Australia (heartfoundation.org.au): co-developer of the Australian Guideline for Assessing and Managing Cardiovascular Disease Risk (2023), used for absolute CVD risk calculation.
Diabetes Australia (diabetesaustralia.com.au): publishes position statements and management guidance for diabetes care.
Cancer Australia (canceraustralia.gov.au): publishes guidance on the national cancer screening programs (breast, cervical, bowel).
Kidney Health Australia (kidney.org.au): publishes the CKD Management in Primary Care handbook.

Treat these as reasonable supplementary reading for their respective topics, not as an AMC-confirmed requirement. Don't let chasing every possible guideline crowd out time spent on practice questions, which is where most of your score improvement will come from.

How to Actually Use These Guidelines

Reading every guideline on this page cover to cover before starting practice questions is a common way to lose months without moving your score. A more efficient approach:

Work through the syllabus and question bank first. Let gaps surface naturally. A missed question about screening intervals or vaccine timing tells you exactly which guideline to check.
Look up the specific point, not the whole document. If a question involves cervical screening intervals, find that one section of the Red Book. You do not need to read the rest of it right now.
Keep a running note of guideline-based facts you get wrong. Screening ages, vaccine schedules, and first-line drug choices are the kind of detail that is easy to get right once you have looked it up properly, and easy to forget if you only skim it once.
Cross-check anything from non-Australian training. If your instinct on a management question comes from training in another country, that is the moment to verify it against the relevant Australian guideline rather than trust the instinct.

For the broader preparation framework these guidelines fit into, see the Preparation Strategy page. For how pharmacology specifically is tested, where Therapeutic Guidelines and the AMH are most useful, see AMC Part 1 Pharmacology. For how guidelines sit alongside textbooks and question banks in a full resource stack, see AMC Part 1 Study Resources.

Australian Clinical Guidelines for AMC Candidates