Medicine at University of Edinburgh Medical School & Interview Questions 2024

Key Aspects

🎓 Edinburgh Medicine Interview Questions & Topics 2024

Given that this is a relatively new process at Edinburgh, before, they used to not interview at all. This is why they place a significant emphasis on the academic requirements for selection to interview (traditionally a very high UCAT score and academic grades).

The Edinburgh website states that their “assessments will be based on the core attributes of medical doctors” - as per the NHS Core Values. This means that the domains that will be covered at the interview are likely to surround the following domains:

1. Knowledge & Problem Solving

2. Safety & Quality

3. Communication, Partnership & Teamwork

4. Maintaining Trust

❓ Edinburgh Medical Interview Past Questions 2024 & Likely Topics

Please find below a list of suggested questions that could come up at your interview this year, created by our team to help guide your preparation. 

Knowledge & Problem Solving

1. Why Edinburgh?

2. What do you know about the course at Edinburgh?

3. Tell us about your work experience.

4. What did you learn from your work experience?

5. Tell us about a time when you saw a mistake being made during your work experience.

6. What is your understanding of a career in medicine?

7. What is your greatest achievement?

8. Give us an example of a time when you demonstrated resilience.

9. Tell us about a condition that you saw in your work experience.

10. Take us through your personal statement

11. After your work experience, did you think of anything you would want to do to improve NHS healthcare settings?

Safety & Quality

1. How do you deal with stress?

2. Ethical scenarios: how would you mitigate risk here? What would you do with a drunk colleague? If you catch someone stealing, what would you do?

3. Tell us about a time when you have had to deal with risk.

4. Tell us about a time when you have dealt with a difficult problem.

5. What is a critical appraisal and why is it important in medicine?

6. As a doctor, who can you escalate a problem to?

Communication, Partnership & Teamwork

1. Give us an example of a time when you demonstrated teamwork.

2. What is the benefit of a multi-disciplinary team?

3. Is the role of a doctor simply to act as a clinician?

4. Give us a time when you solved a problem between two individuals.

5. Give us an example of a time when you have demonstrated empathy

6. What are your best qualities?

7. What is the importance of teamwork within medicine?

8. Describe a time in your life when you have had to show compassion.

9. From your work experience, did you see any examples of working within a team?

Maintaining Trust

1. Tell us about a time when you made a mistake.

2. How important is trust within a team?

3. As a leader, how can you ensure that you trust others and that they trust you?

4. What does patient confidentiality mean? When might you break it?

5. Why should patients trust you?

Presentation Questions

1. You are on the committee for organising an information evening about a GP surgery’s flu vaccination day. Pitch your idea to everyone.

🗣️ University of Edinburgh Medicine Interview Tips 2024

1. Group presentations - Edinburgh Medical School has a group presentation as part of their medicine interview. This means that you will need to be comfortable being watched, analysed and judged throughout this process. Learn how to listen to others, before interjecting and having your own opinion on things about how we should process. Be clear, and concise whilst avoiding waffling. It is important to demonstrate that you are a good leader, team player and speaker here. Try to be proactive throughout this, encourage others to give their ideas, and do not just dismiss what others say. If you are stuck on what to do, volunteer to be the scribe for the sessions.

2. Make sure that you know your personal statement - in the past, this has been a common source of questions for one of the stations at the Edinburgh MMI Interview. Be prepared to talk about any aspect of your personal statement. E.g. if you mentioned the EPQ - make sure you can talk about this in some detail, be able to talk about what you learnt about and maybe even the implications of research on clinical medicine.

3. Have examples ready to use: many of the questions asked at Edinburgh 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.

4. Personal Attributes - Edinburgh 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 200+ interview question and answer guide for dealing with such interview questions. 

5. Know the doctor training pathway: this is useful to mention in answers to show awareness about the career in medicine - and demonstrates that you have a considered approach, fortunately, we have a guide to the NHS and the doctor’s training pathway.

6. 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.

7. MMI Stations - remember that each MMI station at Edinburgh 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.

8. Know the Edinburgh Course - we would always recommend doing this for every university that you plan to apply to. Remember that Edinburgh has a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) course - this is important to know. It is paramount that you know about the different topics covered each year. How does this differ from other universities? Edinburgh has made intercalation compulsory.  Have you any idea about what you would plan to intercalate in at Edinburgh? Remember there is very early clinical exposure at Edinburgh - this can be an advantage!

9. Know the local area - Edinburgh is a diverse region of Scotland, with a number of local factors and diseases that differentiate the Edinburgh region 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?

10. Reflect Well - the Edinburgh 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. Learn about the non-academic societies at Edinburgh - 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 Edinburgh University. Spend time on their website, or looking at their instagram for ideas about societies that you could think about joining.

14. Learn Medical Ethics & NHS Hot Topics - it is extremely likely that you will be asked about medical ethics at a medicine interview at Edinburgh, 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 420+ medicine interview questions.

15. 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.

16. Good Medical Practice - Edinburgh 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.