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Advice & Insight From UCAT Specialists
The final element of the UCAT is the Situational Judgement section (SJT) which looks at how you would react in certain clinical and professional settings. It measures your capacity to understand real-world situations and to identify critical factors and appropriate behaviour in dealing with them. The test assesses integrity, honesty, perspective taking, team involvement, and resilience and adaptability.
Having a good understanding of the GMC guidelines or familiarising yourself with the GMC’s publication entitled “Tomorrow’s doctors” will certainly equip you with the right knowledge to answer the SJT questions. However, rather than spend a lot of time reading and learning all them all, a more efficient use of your time would be to focus on the key concepts and most important scenarios, such as those which are explained in this article.
When answering SJT questions, always hold in mind the four basic principles of medical ethics: beneficence (having compassion and good intentions), non-maleficence (not wanting to do harm), autonomy (respecting patients’ wishes) and justice (equal treatment for all).
For each question you should follow a similar approach. Firstly, make sure you read the scenario carefully and understand the different roles of the people involved. Who is the main player in the scenario? Are they a doctor or medical student? Is the action putting a patient at potential harm? Next, diagnose the main problem in the scenario and how serious it is. Think about what the central issue is specifically and decide what element needs addressing. For example, is it a question of conflict, confidentiality, patient safety, unprofessional behaviour? Finally, read the statement very carefully.
Imagine that you are there in the scenario. You could imagine that you are a caring and conscientious medical student a few years from now in each situation as it unfolds. With your knowledge of medical ethics in mind, what would you do? What do you think would be the right thing to do in this situation? You should have at the forefront of your mind the fact that any decision that affects patient care should be made to benefit the patient and as such, work colleagues’ feelings are only of secondary importance. Patient safety should always be at the centre. If you always bear in mind the key principles of professional conduct, then you will find it easier to choose the right answer.
Remember that in any given scenario, you shouldn’t judge a response as being the only response that will happen. There can be multiple optimal responses to the same scenario, for example, when a GP wants to do a blood test, there are a number of very important things s/he has to do including gaining consent, checking records, logging results and prescribing appropriate medicines. So, try not to compare responses for the same scenario because it is much better to consider each response on its own merits. After all, you may find that several responses could be “very appropriate” or “very important” for the same scenario.
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