Practise, practise & practise

We understand that the thought of going through an interview process might seem daunting as this might be your first formal interview. With adequate preparation, you will be able to settle your nerves and build confidence. To familiarise with speaking in an interview style, it’s important to practise as many possible questions with friends, family or use Med Ready’s one to one service to ensure maximum preparation. It’s also good practice, if you record your answers to make particular note of the tone of your answer and length – should roughly be 2-3 minutes depending on the question.

Structure your answer

When answering appropriate questions it’s important to use a structured approach so you provide a clear and concise answer. A possible approach is using the acronym STARR to help you.

Situation: You start your answer by giving the interviewer an overview of what you did. This could be your personal, unique example.

Task: Next you describe what the task was. What were you asked to do or what did you have to achieve?

Action: In this section, hone in specifically on what you did. Make sure the interviewer knows what you did in detail.

Result: Follow by talking about the result of your actions. Did it go well or not as expected?

Reflection: Finish by explaining what the overall experience taught you and link if possible to medicine/healthcare.

For example:

Give me an example where you demonstrated good teamwork skills

“I play cricket and football which are team sports, showing I am a good team player”

– this is a bad answer

“I have excellent team working skills and have shown this throughout my extra- curricular activities. A particular example was on DofE when our team unfortunately got lost with bad weather hampering team morale. This led to conflict and disagreement within the team. I recognised we were losing focus of our objective. I helped rally the team’s focus through motivation and resolving conflict by speaking separately to the members in disagreement. This boosted the team morale and regain focus on our objective which helped us to reach the campsite. This experience taught me the need to diffuse escalating situations and how teamwork and team morale are vital in achieving the collective objective. This can relate to healthcare as team friction can be detrimental to patient health” – this is a good answer

The STARR acronym is one possible approach and may not be applicable to all questions. The main idea is for your answer to follow a systematic order to help make your answer concise and impactful, not waffled. Another structured example would be when answering ethical questions. It’s important to give an overview statement about the topic, arguments against, arguments for and a balanced conclusion.

Be Confident/Enthusiastic

You need to come across as a confident individual but make sure you don’t cross the line and come across as arrogant. Showing confidence can be achieved in the way you deliver your answer, tone of voice and body language. Being enthusiastic for certain questions (motivation to study medicine) is an excellent way to show the interviewer you have passion to study medicine at that particular university. But again, don’t go overboard as it can come across as fake & cheesy.

Be Natural

Whilst preparation is key to ace your medicine/dentistry interview, it’s important to not go over the top and memorise answers word for word. This can make your answer sound scripted and robotic. Under pressure, it can be very easy to forget answers or muddle the delivery when trying to remember the answer you prepared. That’s why it’s important to know key points well and explain them in a natural way using appropriate tone of voice. Very likely, even after adequate preparation you will come across questions in your interview that you haven’t come across. That’s why it’s important to develop overall interview skills which we teach in our crash course and one to one lessons, rather than simply memorising answers to questions.

The step up from medical school to FY1 has been both challenging and rewarding. After 4 weeks settling in, it seemed daunting to work nights for the first time. As I was on a surgical rotation, my job overnight as an FY1 was to provide ward cover for all the surgical inpatients.

The shift starts at 9pm in acute surgical unit, where the day team hands over unfinished jobs – e.g. checking blood results, inserting cannulas and reviewing unwell inpatients. The day on call FY1 hands over the bleep – the device that allows the wards to communicate with you. Across the nights, I was receiving significantly more bleeps than I had been used to on the day job. In our training we often talk about developing time management and task prioritisation skills – these became vital to apply in order to complete tasks efficiently.

When reviewing unwell inpatients, I used a systematic approach drilled into us in medical school: A – airway; B – breathing; C – circulation; D – disability; E – exposure. For example, I was asked to review a patient with a blood pressure of 96/66. Her airway was patent, and her breathing was normal. When assessing her circulation, she appeared clinically dry and her fluid balance chart showed that she had been losing more fluid than she had been taking in. Therefore, I prescribed intravenous fluids to slowly rehydrate her overnight. Later on, I was called to see a patient with painful urinary retention. An ultrasound scan showed a distended bladder containing 1 litre of urine. This drained after inserting a catheter and he felt much better, which was very rewarding to see.

The hospital can be an intimidating place at night, and you can at times feel out of your depth.  However, there is support when you need it. When an urgent arrest call was put out, there were already 3 senior doctors on the scene before I arrived. This is when that buzzword “teamwork” becomes important to provide the best patient outcomes.

By Dr. James Ayathamattam

I always looked forward for the opportunity to interact with real patients during hospital and clinical placements. Students in the above years always mentioned that it was as if your textbooks come to life. For pre-clinical years, we didn’t have much clinical exposure, with the emphasis on medical theory such as pharmacology and biochemistry. After this, we usually do an intercalated degree – mine was in Cardiovascular Sciences. Then comes 3 clinical years…

In my first few months, I started at the Royal Free Hospital in London – a place renowned for treating patients with infectious diseases such as Ebola. I arrived at the hospital early morning, both excited and nervous. The day starts with the morning handover, where the night shift team reports back key pieces of information about current patients. They relay this information using a succinct tool called SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation). I realised the importance of that all-important buzzword ‘communication’ we fill in our personal statements – without it, you would be endangering safe continuity of care for patients that you treat.

We’re assigned a small group consisting of a consultant/registrar, juniors, nurses, physiotherapists and then, armed with a few facts and phrases you gleaned on the train ride to the hospital, we visited patients. This is more daunting than it seems as you’re put on the spot to answer questions asked by your seniors!

However, it’s rewarding when you learn important clinical signs to carry out supervised medical examinations such as checking their breathing, abdomen or assessing the state of neurological functions. It truly is fascinating to see all arms of the medical world come to play, with pharmacists conversing with doctors about prescriptions and physiotherapists aiding with breathing exercises

We also get to experience being assigned a junior doctor, great at refining our examination skills and helping us develop that much-needed clinical knowledge. I still remember one of the juniors playing a game of differentials with us – much like House, where we’d be given a clinical sign and have to suggest as many possible causes under a minute.