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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.
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, set out in the NHS Constitution for England, is essential to a top-tier response. These are the shared attributes that all NHS staff are expected to live by, and interviewers love to see candidates who can name them and bring them to life with examples. The six values are:
- 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.
For a deeper breakdown of each value with worked interview examples, read our full guide to the 6 NHS core values for the medicine interview. It is one of the most reliably asked NHS questions, so it pays to have a sentence ready on every value.
- 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
To practise weaving these NHS topics into your answers, our medicine interview coaching offers 1-1 mock interviews with a tutor matched to your universities.
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 it actually works, including its structure and how funding flows through it. A big 2025 change worth knowing is that NHS England is being abolished and its functions merged back into the Department of Health and Social Care over roughly two years, with the system now organised around Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and Integrated Care Systems (ICSs). The government also published its 10-Year Health Plan, Fit for the Future, in July 2025, built around three shifts: hospital to community, analogue to digital, and treatment to prevention.
NHS structure and funding is taught in interview ready depth on our medicine interview course, alongside the ethics and communication stations these topics usually turn up in.
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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?
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.
- Read More: Ageing Population & Social Care in the NHS
- 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.
- Read More: Privatisation of the NHS
- 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.
Other challenges worth researching include the elective care backlog, the GP shortage and access crisis, winter pressures, and the growing role of AI in medicine. For a structured overview of how the system itself is organised, the structure of the NHS guide covers ICBs, ICSs and primary, secondary and tertiary care.
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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.
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 2026!
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 the full, regularly updated list of NHS and medicine current affairs, see our NHS hot topics and current affairs hub, and for one-to-one coaching on these answers explore our medicine interview tutoring.
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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Frequently asked questions
What are the most common NHS questions in a medicine interview?
Common NHS interview questions fall into three areas: information and importance (how the NHS works, its values, why it matters), challenges and threats (the biggest problems facing it and how to fix them), and changes and optimisation (what you would improve with or without a bigger budget). You may also be asked to name the 6 NHS core values or describe the NHS structure.
What are the 6 NHS core values?
The 6 NHS core values, set out in the NHS Constitution, are: working together for patients; respect and dignity; commitment to quality of care; compassion; improving lives; and everyone counts. They are the attributes every member of NHS staff is expected to demonstrate. Learn one short example for each so you can apply them in answers rather than just listing them.
What is the difference between the 6 NHS values and the 6 Cs?
The 6 NHS core values come from the NHS Constitution and apply to the whole NHS. The 6 Cs (care, compassion, competence, communication, courage and commitment) are a more memorable framework specifically for nursing and health and social care staff. They overlap heavily, so it is fine to mention both, but the 6 core values are the safer answer to a direct NHS values question.
What are the biggest challenges facing the NHS in 2026?
Key challenges to discuss include an ageing population and rising multimorbidity, chronic understaffing, the elective care backlog and long waiting lists, the GP access crisis, underfunded social care and mental health services, and the threat of creeping privatisation. Strong candidates link a challenge to a possible solution rather than simply listing problems.
Why was NHS England abolished in 2025?
In March 2025 the government announced it would abolish NHS England and bring its functions back under direct ministerial control within the Department of Health and Social Care. The aim was to streamline accountability, cut duplication and reduce running costs. The change is being phased in over roughly two years, with care now coordinated through Integrated Care Boards and Integrated Care Systems.
What is the NHS 10-Year Health Plan?
The 10-Year Health Plan for England, Fit for the Future, was published in July 2025. It sets out three major shifts: from hospital to community care, from analogue to digital, and from treating sickness to preventing it. It is backed by a multi-billion-pound real-terms funding increase. Mentioning it shows interviewers you follow current NHS policy.
How do I answer how I would change or improve the NHS?
Pick one or two realistic areas, explain why they matter and acknowledge trade-offs. Good choices include investing in social care to free hospital beds, expanding preventative and public health programmes, improving mental health waiting times, and tackling regional health inequality. Always show you understand resources are finite, so improving one area means prioritising it over another.
How does the NHS structure work?
Following the 2025 reforms, NHS England's planning functions are merging into the Department of Health and Social Care. Locally, Integrated Care Systems bring together NHS bodies, councils and partners, led by Integrated Care Boards that plan and fund services for a region. Care is then delivered across primary care (GPs, pharmacies), secondary care (hospitals) and tertiary care (specialist centres).
What are the NHS core principles?
The NHS rests on the principle that good healthcare should be comprehensive, available to all, and free at the point of use, based on clinical need rather than ability to pay. These founding principles, alongside the 6 core values, underpin the NHS Constitution and are exactly what interviewers want you to understand when they ask why the NHS is important.
How do you deal with an ageing population in a medicine interview answer?
Acknowledge that an ageing population means more patients with multiple long-term conditions, greater demand on hospitals and social care, and workforce pressure. Then suggest solutions: better integration of health and social care, investment in community and preventative care, supporting carers, and using technology to manage chronic disease at home. Showing balance and realism scores higher than a one-sided answer.
Which parts of the NHS need more funding?
Commonly cited underfunded areas include social care, mental health and psychiatry, primary care and general practice, preventative and public health, and services in deprived or rural regions. There is no single correct answer; what matters is justifying your choice and acknowledging that funding one area means deprioritising another, which demonstrates mature ethical reasoning.
What NHS hot topics should I know for my medicine interview?
Strong topics for 2026 include the abolition of NHS England and the 10-Year Health Plan, resident (junior) doctor industrial action, the GP and workforce shortage, NHS waiting list backlogs, AI in medicine, physician associates, and the role of prevention and public health. Read around two or three in depth rather than knowing many superficially.
How is the NHS different in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
Health is devolved, so each nation runs its own system. NHS England's structural reforms apply only to England; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own organisations and policies, for example different approaches to prescription charges and social care. Showing you know the NHS is four systems, not one, impresses interviewers and avoids a common factual error.
How much do I need to know about the NHS for a medicine interview?
You do not need to be a policy expert, but you should know the 6 core values, the founding principles, the basics of NHS structure, two or three major challenges with possible solutions, and one or two current hot topics in depth. The aim is to show genuine interest and balanced reasoning, not to recite statistics. Practising answers aloud is the best preparation.
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