Medicine at University of Cardiff Medical School & Interview Questions 2026

Minimum age requirements

Applicants must be 18 by 20 September of the year of entry, as students are in a clinical environment from Year 1.

Cardiff Medicine with a Preliminary/Foundation Year

🎓 Cardiff Medicine Interview Questions & Topics

The MMIs at Cardiff help to determine if you:

• Can think on your feet
• Have thought about some of the issues that are important to the profession
• Can critically appraise information
• Can communicate ideas effectively

They also focus on exploring the personal qualities and attributes that are important to your future career development.

For 2024, Cardiff will assess an applicant’s compatibility with the description of what it means to be a good doctor seen in Good Medical Practice.

This involves the following key statutes and domains:

• Prioritise patient care and safety
• Be competent and keep your professional knowledge and skills up to date
• Take prompt action if you think patient safety is compromised
• Establish and maintain good partnerships with your patients and colleagues
• Maintain trust in you and the profession by being open, honest and acting with integrity

The Cardiff Medicine Interview in 2024 will assess your aptitude as a potential doctor and testing your commitment to and understanding of a career in medicine. You can expect the topics to cover:

• Your motivation for medicine
• Your personal insight and realistic understanding of a career in medicine
• Your personal strengths and weaknesses
• Your ability to evaluate ethical scenarios and consider patient rights
• Your ability to work in a team and as a leader
• Your understanding of the Welsh healthcare system and contemporary issues affecting the NHS
• Your understanding of and reflections on your own personal suitability for the course at Cardiff

❓ Cardiff Medical Interview Questions & Likely Topics

These are suggested practice questions based on publicly available information and past trends. They are not official questions from the University and may not appear in your interview. Use them as part of a broader preparation strategy.

Motivation to study medicine

1. Why medicine?
2. Why Cardiff?
3. What did you learn from your work experience?
4. What qualities of a doctor did you see from your work experience?
5. What do you know about the Cardiff Medicine course? How is it taught? What do you know about C21?
6. Why do you think you will be well suited to this course?
7. Why medicine and not dentistry or nursing?
8. Tell us about your volunteering
9. What are your hobbies?
10. What are the negatives of a career in medicine?
11. You don’t live in Wales, so why do you want to come to Cardiff?
12. What other subjects other than medicine does a doctor need to be proficient at?
13. How will you contribute to Cardiff medical school?

Personal Insight

1. Why should patients trust you?
2. What are your best qualities?
3. How do you manage stress?
4. Can you provide us with an example of a time when you demonstrated resilience?
5. Give us an example of a time when you demonstrated teamwork.
6. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
7. How would your friends describe you?
8. Tell us about an article that you have recently read.

NHS & Local Area

1. What changes would you make to the NHS if you could?
2. How would you improve the local A&E department?
3. What are the NHS values and why are they important?
4. What is it like to be a doctor?
5. How do you deal with overpopulation?
6. What do you know about the local area here in Cardiff?
7. How might healthcare in Wales be different to that in England?
8. What are the main challenges that face the NHS?
9. What do you know about how the NHS is funded? What would you change?
10. How has COVID changed the way the NHS operates?
11. What do you think are going to be the long-term consequences of COVID on the NHS?
12. How does the healthcare system differ here compared to other areas in the UK?

Ethical Scenarios

1. Understanding of the four ethical principles
2. Understanding of the GMC’s good medical practice
3. What is the debate surrounding euthanasia, should it be legalised?
4. Who would you give this organ to? [Prioritisation]
5. Who can you escalate concerns to within a hospital?
6. What does patient confidentiality mean? When might you break it?
7. What is a critical appraisal and why is it important in medicine?

🗣️ Cardiff Medicine Interview Tips 2026

1. Have examples ready to use: many of the questions asked at Cardiff are example-based, ie, they require you to draw on certain examples from your personal life, medical work experience and medical volunteering to help make key points that the selectors are looking for. As such, it is paramount that you spend time learning about these examples and thinking about different scenarios that you can use at the interview. It is helpful if these scenarios are malleable and can be applied to a number of different questions e.g. being a football captain, deputy head girl or playing in the school orchestra.
2. Personal Attributes - Cardiff is very likely to ask you about personal attributes during the MMI interview. As such it is paramount that you go through and learn these. Check out our interview guide for more information on this.
3. Know the doctor training pathway: this is a common question that comes up at Cardiff, fortunately, we have a guide to the NHS and the doctor’s training pathway.
4. Read the MMI instructions carefully - you get enough time to read the instructions provided before the MMI station. Make sure that you don’t miss anything from this. Try and plan how you will structure your answer thereafter in the reading time that you get. Therefore it is really important that you practice MMI questions and ensure that you think about your structure for as many questions as possible before your interview.
5. MMI Stations - remember that each MMI station at Cardiff is independent of the other. Therefore it is paramount that you try to treat them as such, if you have a bad station, try to forget about it and reset for the next station, this gives you the best chance of scoring well overall. Read our ultimate guide to preparing for medicine MMIs here.
6. Reflect Well - the Cardiff Medicine selectors love reflection, make sure that you are good at not just stating what you have learnt, but also how this helped and what you benefitted from, and what you will carry forward about this at medical school and in clinical medicine. This is especially true when reflecting on your medical work experience during the medicine interview.
7. Practice Role Plays: Role plays are unique to medicine MMI interviews as they do not tend to occur in panel interviews. The only way to ace these stations is to practice! There are so many different medicine role-play scenarios that can come up, such as breaking bad news in the medicine interview, it is paramount that you read about tips for answering role-play scenarios and practice MMI calculation stations. You might want to also consider practising this with a medicine interview tutor, or booking a 1-1 online mock interview.
8. Know the local area - Cardiff is a diverse region situated in Wales, with a number of local factors and diseases that is different from the rest of the UK. Ensure that you research both communicable and non-communicable diseases in the area. How might this impact healthcare provision in the area? Make sure you know about the Welsh NHS.
9. Know the Cardiff Course - Cardiff has a fairly unique course, known as C21, where they take a holistic approach to medicine. This means that there is early patient contact, and lots of early patient exposure with an integrated approach to clinical assessments - make sure that you know all about this, and why it is suited to you. It also uses case-based learning, so make sure you know the advantages of this.
10. Don’t over-rehearse - this is a common theme amongst interview students and is very obvious to a trained examiner. As such, we would recommend focusing on the structure of your answer, and then naturally letting it flow when speaking to the answers, concentrating on the delivery of your interview answers. Read about our top tips for medicine interviews here. If you are struggling with this, consider booking sessions with an expert medicine interview tutor.
11. Learn about the non-academic societies at Cardiff - this is really important and might augment your Why Medicine question as well as help you formulate an answer to how you will contribute to life at Cardiff University. Spend time on their website, or looking at their instagram for ideas about societies that you could think about joining.
12. Learn Medical Ethics & NHS Hot Topics - it is extremely likely that you will be asked about medical ethics at a medicine interview at Cardiff, so there is no excuse not to brush up on your knowledge on these topics, especially the four pillars of medical ethics. Learn how to provide a balanced argument on this. Check out some of our free articles on NHS Hot Topics here. It is good if you have an opinion on them, as long as you present a balanced and well-reasoned argument, ultimately, which side you choose does not matter, but is helpful to have. Check out our bank of 200+ medicine interview questions.
13. Learn the NHS Core Values - This can be drawn into different answers about personal qualities or qualities of a doctor, which has formed a feature of stations in the past, and a good understanding of these core values will help you stand out against others. It is important to know about the NHS in general for your medical interviews - read our article here on this.
14. Good Medical Practice - Cardiff also puts emphasis on knowing the values and qualities of a good doctor, which can be found in this document and are likely to come up at the interview in the MMI stations. This is universal to many universities, and something that we always recommend students cover during their medicine interview preparation.