Newcastle University Medicine Interview Questions

Motivation and Insight into Medicine – This station investigates your knowledge of the field of medicine and your awareness of the current issues affecting this field. Relevant work experience in a clinical setting is of great benefit at this station as it will allow you to add depth to your answers to questions such as:

• Why you want to study Medicine?
• What speciality are you interested in?
• Why do you want to study at Newcastle?
• Why you think you would be good at Medicine?
• Why Medicine compared to other health degrees?
• What makes a good doctor?
• What do you think is the worst issue with the NHS at present?
• What are the possibilities of becoming a doctor after finishing the degree?

General/Personal Statement Station – This station provides you with the opportunity to not only reflect on your personal statement, but give the interviewers an insight into who you are as a person. You should expect questions along the lines of:

• What makes you a good communicator?
• Tell us about a time when you worked as part of a team/as a team player?
• Tell me about a patient you encountered during your work experience?

Ethical Scenarios – This station examines your ability to look at an issue from different perspectives and justify your decisions. Often there is no clear right or wrong answer to these stations. Review the ‘2 Sorts, 2 Sides’ approach to MMI Ethical Scenarios for advice on how to approach these vitally important stations.

• A range of practice scenarios with model answers can be found in the MMI Question Bank.

Role Play Scenarios – These often involves a trained actor or a senior medical student and this station is designed to examine your personal attributes such as empathy, caring and being non-judgemental.  This may involve for example, breaking bad news to a patient. For effective ways to navigate these scenarios review BlackStone Tutors “6 Stages of MMI Role Play” and review the Online Question Bank for a range of MMI Role Play Scenarios with model answers. Communication Stations – These stations can vary considerably in their topic of focus, however central to all communication stations is the need to implement the‘7 Stages of MMI Communication Stations’. Recent examples of Communication Tasks have included the following:

• Without any hand gestures, verbally explain to the examiner how to tie a shoelace.
• Explaining your reasoning behind selecting five objects from a table to take on a camping trip. (Overlap between Communication & Prioritisation Stations)
• Discuss the following data sheet with the interviewer.