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Application Guide 2024:
Interview
NHS MMI Medicine Interview Topics 2024
Medicine Admissions Experts
Introduction
One of the most common types of MMI medical school interview questions is the NHS issues question. You can be asked about various aspects of how the NHS works, what issues it’s facing and what the 6 NHS core values are.
Whilst this can seem daunting, there is some simple preparation that you can do to be prepared for whatever you can be asked. This article will cover the content you need to know, some common NHS interview questions and some top NHS interview tips.
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What are the NHS core values?
One key type of NHS interview question is the NHS values interview question. Knowledge of the 6 core NHS values is key to having a top-tier response. These are attributes that all employees of the NHS - from doctors to gardeners - are expected to demonstrate.
Working together for patients: The core value covers two important features: teamwork and patient prioritisation. Patients come first in the NHS mission statement, and all NHS employees must work together to benefit them.
Respect and dignity: Patients, their families and members of NHS staff are all humans who matter and ought to be treated with dignity and respect. Their aspirations and hopes ought to be considered, making autonomy a crucial principle.
Commitment to quality of care: The NHS seeks to prioritise three aspects of quality of care: safety, effectiveness, and patient experience. It is important to live up to the trust placed nationally in the NHS.
Compassion: Patients aren’t just medical puzzles - they are human beings. Everyone’s pain and emotional responses to the volatile situations inherent to medicine are important, and NHS employees need to recognise this and respond with compassion.
Improving lives: People who engage with the NHS ought to leave their experience in a better place than they would have been in without the NHS. It is important to improve the lives of patients and staff.
Everyone counts: No one should be discriminated against for any reason, excluded, or left behind. Equal access to healthcare is of the utmost importance.
👉🏻 Read more: The 6 NHS Core Values for the Medicine Interview
👉🏻 Read more: MMI Prioritisation Tasks for the Medicine Interview
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What else should I know about the NHS for my medicine interview?
In addition to the NHS’ six core values, you should be aware of the following important details. They can be particularly helpful to draw upon in response to common NHS interview questions, and take your answers from good to great.
Career progression: It’s always a good idea to know what happens after medical school - starting with foundation years and diverging from there depending on speciality. Check out the full medical training pathway here. Broadly speaking, you will complete two years of foundation training before completing either run through training in a speciality, or 3 years of medicine, surgery or anaesthetics training, before applying for a sub-speciality. This lasts for 6-8 years depending on the speciality before you complete your CCT in a speciality.
The six Cs: The six Cs are a framework of key values which are important for health and social care staff to provide compassionate care. They are a more memorable - if less specific - version of the NHS core values. They are care, compassion, competence, communication, courage, and commitment. You can read about them here.
Structure and funding: Key to answering any question about the NHS is an understanding of how exactly it works - including both its structure and how funding flows through it. The King’s Fund has a useful guide to this.
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What are some common NHS interview questions?
Common NHS interview questions tend to be centred on three core areas:
Information & importance: How does the NHS work, what are the NHS' key values, why is it so important and what makes it unique amongst healthcare systems across the globe?
Challenges & threats: What are the key challenges facing the NHS today and how might we alleviate these? What do you know about confidentiality?
Changes & optimisation: How would you change the NHS, both without and with a bigger budget? What could it be doing better?
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What are the biggest challenges facing the NHS today?
One of the most common questions on the NHS asks what you think the biggest challenge facing it today is. Some key possibilities worth remembering and researching are:
Ageing population: Key demographic shifts are causing problems for the NHS. Not only is the population growing, but it is also ageing. No longer is a 50-year-old diagnosed with a single condition that ails them until they pass away 20 years later. Now, people are living into their 80s, 90s and 100s, accumulating numerous medical conditions and requiring a complex network of medications. These all interact with each other to make individual patient cases not only more complex but also less confined to a single speciality. Therefore, the importance of teamwork between specialities becomes far more important as each patient demands more time, resources and energy from physicians.
Privatisation: The NHS’s key goal is to provide high-quality care that is free at the point of use. Privatisation of various components threatens this, as the possibility of a US-style insurance-based system looms large. Key things to consider here are wealthy lobbyists for privatisation of parts of the NHS, and deals that the government may make with the US government as part of trade negotiations to give large pharmaceutical companies more power in the UK.
Understaffing: Understaffing is both a contributing factor to the problem of the ageing population and an issue in its own right. Many healthcare workers move to countries with better working conditions such as Australia, and Brexit has significantly decreased the number of international workers coming to the UK to contribute to the NHS. This stretches resources thinner and makes it more difficult to give patients the care that they deserve.
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What parts of the NHS may need more funding?
Another particularly common question about the NHS asks you to consider underfunded departments, or where you might allocate more money if you had the means to do so. Generally, you can justify any answer here - particularly if you can link it to personal or work experience. However, consider the four following possibilities as well:
Social care: Social care is chronically underfunded, to the point that some elderly people remain in geriatric wards of hospitals because care homes lack capacity.
Mental healthcare & psychiatry: Waiting lists for various aspects of psychiatry are disproportionately long compared to physical healthcare. In particular, waiting lists for patients experiencing suicidal thoughts can be up to a year or even two in some parts of the country.
Primary care: GP services vary significantly in funding. Some function very well, but some - particularly in overpopulated areas - struggle to cater to their entire patient base specifically.
Particular regions: Healthcare inequality between various regions of the UK is very real, and something which you can look into. In particular, think about the underfunding of medical services in rural regions.
Preventative medicine: Medicine isn’t just about dealing with conditions after they arise. Think also about preventing illness & injury, for instance by investing in public health campaigns.
There are plenty more answers and this certainly is not an exhaustive list! However, you can use them as a basis for your research.
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Other stations
If you’re looking for guides to other possible medicine stations, including how to answer questions like these mock medicine interview questions, then check out the other articles in our Ultimate Medicine Interview Guide 2024!
Additionally, remember to read through our full guide to current hot topics in medicine for more information about the NHS in interviews such as abortion, the charlie gard case, the Archie Battersbee case and all about harold shipman.
For individual help or 1-1 medicine interview tutoring, 1-1 mock interviews or general medicine interview coaching, get in touch with us at TheUKCATPeople. We offer expert medical interview preparation, including for specific medical schools. Check out the packages that we offer here!
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Related Links
Free Guides
Important Cases in The NHS: MMI Interview Guides
Ethics For MMI Medicine Interviews
MMI Interview Stations
NHS Hot Topics 2024
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