Medicine at University of Queen's Belfast Medical School & Interview Questions 2024

Key Aspects

🎓 University of Queen's Belfast Medicine Interview Questions & Topics 2024

These interviews have been designed to test the following which has been identified by both patients and academic staff as key non-cognitive competencies for medicine:

• Empathy

• Problem-solving

• Moral reasoning

• Communication Skills

Notoriously - the QUB medicine interviews are extremely role-play-heavy. So make sure that you practice these scenarios in your mock interviews and during your preparation.

💯 Queen's Belfast Medical MMI Interview Questions Scoring 2024

• The candidate should look at the non-cognitive competencies that are being tested, such as problem-solving, ethical reasoning, and communication, and consider how their background has prepared them to demonstrate these qualities.

• Before entering the interview station, the candidate should take a minute to consider the scenario and what it entails. They should ask themselves what competencies the scenario might be testing and how they would approach the problem at hand, considering the options and discussing their decision-making process with the assessor.

• It is important to remember that each station carries equal weight and that poor performance in one station can be made up for in the others.

❓ Queen's Belfast 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 interview preparation. 

Motivation to study medicine

1. Why medicine?

2. Why Queen's Belfast?

3. What do you know about the Queen's Belfast Medicine course? How is it taught?

4. Why do you think you will be well suited to this course?

5. What is the role of a doctor within the MDT?

6. Why medicine and not dentistry or nursing?

7. Tell us about your volunteering

8. What is your understanding of good patient care?

9. What are your hobbies?

Personal Insight

1. Why should patients trust you?

2. What are your best qualities?

3. How do you manage stress?

4. Tell us about a recent setback. How would you prevent the same thing from happening again?

5. What is empathy? Why is it important in medicine?

6. Tell us about a time when you had lots to do at one time. How did you go about sorting this out? How did that make you feel?

7. What are your strengths and weaknesses?

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. Ethics: A pregnant woman has previously stated that she does not want to be resuscitated if her heart stops during childbirth. However, when she goes into cardiac arrest, her husband demands that everything be done to save her. Discuss the ethical considerations and how you would handle the situation.

6. Ethics: A patient with advanced cancer requests assisted suicide. Discuss the ethical considerations and how you would approach the situation.

7. Professionalism: A colleague of yours is consistently late for surgeries and appointments. How would you address this issue with them?

8. Professionalism: A patient confides in you about a serious crime they have committed. Discuss the ethical and legal implications of this situation and how you would handle it.

9. Ethics: A patient with a terminal illness requests to be placed in a medically induced coma until a cure is found. Discuss the ethical considerations and how you would approach the situation.

🗣️ Queen's Belfast Medicine Interview Tips for 2024 entry

1. Ethical Scenarios - Queen's Belfast have ethical scenarios every year at the interview. They provided several tips on answering ethical questions. They have mentioned that there is not a single right answer, use evidence or explanation to back up your answers, explain your thought processes, don’t assume prior knowledge on the interviewers’ part – not all interviewers will be medics, and show awareness and recognition of different viewpoints, don’t ‘sit on the fence’ – have an opinion and take a common sense approach

2. Practice Role Plays: Role plays are unique to medicine interviews and so common at Queen’s Belfast. 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.

3. Learn Medical Ethics & NHS Hot Topics - it is extremely likely that you will be asked about medical ethics at a medicine interview at Queen's Belfast, 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.

4. Have examples ready to use: many of the questions asked at Queen's Belfast 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.

5. Know what to expect - Remember interviews can be conducted by a range of professionals and you may not only be interviewed by a doctor. You may encounter careers professional, actors, professional support staff, and teaching staff, particularly in MMIs. Avoid using very technical terms, you may have more clinical knowledge than those assessing you.

6. Personal Attributes - Queen's Belfast is very likely to ask you about personal attributes during their vMMI interview. As such it is paramount that you go through and learn these.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. MMI Stations - remember that each MMI station at Queen's Belfast 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.

10. Know the Queen's Belfast Course - we would always recommend doing this for every university that you plan to apply to. It is paramount that you know about the different topics covered each year. How does this differ from other universities? Remember there is very early clinical exposure at Queen's Belfast - this can be an advantage!

11. Know the local area - Queen's Belfast is in a diverse region of England, with a number of local factors and diseases that differentiate the South Coast region from the rest of the UK. Ensure that you research both communicable and non-communicable diseases in the area. They have a number of services here including Queen's Belfast university medical centre to support students. How might this impact healthcare provision in the area?

12. Reflect Well - the Queen's Belfast 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.

13. 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.

14. Learn about the non-academic societies at Queen's Belfast - 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 Queen's Belfast University. Spend time on their website, or looking at their Instagram for ideas about societies that you could think about joining.

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 - Queen's Belfast 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.