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Welcome to Ace Your NHS Consultant Interview - the podcast for doctors who want to take the stress and guesswork out of their NHS consultant interview prep.
We know how overwhelming it can feel to prep for your consultant interviews when you’re already stretched thin.
Each episode, we’ll break down what actually works - no fluff, no endless reading, just practical steps you can fit into a hectic week. You’ll hear honest advice, real stories, and the frameworks we use with our own students inside the Academy to help you show up confident, prepped, and ready to secure the job you want.
If you’re a final year trainee or locum consultant and you want to prepare, not panic, you’re in the right place.
Hello and welcome to the Ace Your Consultant interview podcast. I'm Tessa Davis and I'm Becky Platt and if you're a final year trainee or a low-income consultant and you want to prep, not panic, then you're in the right place. Welcome to our Ace Your Consultant interview podcast where Becky and I will be chatting about common things that might come up for you during your NHS consultant prep.
It is based on our experience of coaching over a thousand students through their NHS substantive consultant interviews. So we're going to start off with a question of the week which is a question that's been put to us by our academy students. So what have we got this week Becky? Yeah okay so this is a student who's asked us about their interview presentation.
They've been told that they're going to be called at 8am and given the title of a five-minute presentation that they need to prepare and their interview is at 9am so they've got one hour to prepare a presentation. Right Tessa, how would you approach this? I think that is pretty stressful. I think the first thing is to acknowledge that is a bit stressful.
So presentations I would say happen in about half of consultant interviews so not everyone would get a presentation and the vast majority, I'm going to say 90% or more, get their question a week or two before. The question is normally related to future vision of the department or service but getting it an hour before is stressful. I think you need to acknowledge that everyone's in the same boat is the first thing so every candidate will also be getting it at 8am so you all have a short time to prep and you need to be focused in that time so you know before it's going to happen.
So I think you know it's by the sounds of this question it's an online presentation, I don't know, well they're getting a phone call. I think that's what it was. Okay so you're going to be in your own environment, you know you've got an hour, clear all notifications, clutter, you need to focus in that hour and you need to use it wisely.
So they will give you the question, very likely to be about future goals and vision, so think about the stuff that you've learned in your pre-interview meetings and we talked about this last week but thinking about the gold that they have given you in the pre-interview meetings is exactly what you should be putting in this and one important thing I think for thinking about presentations is it's not just what you think the future vision should be of the department or what you think you want to tell them but it's actually thinking about what they want to hear. So if it was me and I had an hour I would spend the first 10 minutes thinking if I was on the panel and I asked this question what is it that I'm wanting to hear from the candidate because I think that helps just flip your perspective. Yeah I think so and I think yeah as you say if you've heard things from the pre-interview meeting absolutely slot that in.
If there are people on the panel that you know have certain priorities or certain areas of interest then you need to give them some nuggets in that answer there needs to be something in there for everyone. Yeah and it's like not suggesting something that's you know isn't in keeping with what they want like there's no point in you saying you want to develop a new service for whatever the vision is that the department should have a service for whatever when actually the context is that they had that and they scrapped it or they talked about it and they decided that they're not going to do that or they've got it already. So if you pick things that aren't that show that you haven't really done your due diligence then I think it can start you off on the wrong footing.
So it's really make sure that the stuff that you're sharing is actually relevant to them and shows all the work you've done and checking out who they are and understanding them and knowing them beforehand and then I guess is also bringing in your skills as well so it's not just this is what I think a great vision for your department would be but also remember you're applying for a job there so part of it is well why are you going to help them achieve that and that's where you bring in your unique selling points and what your experience is of these areas that you've picked and so it's this it's not the golden triads essentially is to answer their question but to do it with things that are related to them and tailored to them and also things that you can bring and it can be hard it's not that you will necessarily be able to have all of these things for every single point but if you can do that that's gold but five minutes is a short length of time so what do you reckon timing wise there Becky? I think with these five minute presentations I really think of them as an interview question that you already knew the answer to that you already knew in advance and so I would structure it in the same way that I would structure any other interview question really and by that I mean providing an introduction to what you're going to do and three clear points that you're going to address during that answer and you can signpost the panel to those and then come back to an answer to a summary at the end so I think don't make it any more complicated than that just stick to a clear structure that you already know. Yeah because you're not you can't get much done in five minutes really like it's essentially a slightly longer than average interview answer that's it and if you try to do too much you're risking getting cut off and I think that's hard like timing wise I would guess they would give you a bit of leeway with only an hour's notice because how could you have timed it you can't time it to perfection but yeah you can't have a 10 minute presentation so you're gonna have to make sure that you've got three points you're gonna have about a minute to talk about each point so it's not a long time and so it's really choosing what you choose to share carefully in that time so cut out all the unnecessary fluff and just pack it in with the specifics and be and clarity that you're answering their question what do you think about slides I don't know they I don't think in this question they said whether they'd been told to do slides or not. No there was no guidance on slides I personally would go slide free for this and I think first of all it's five minutes I don't want to be baffling around sharing my screen and worrying that my slides aren't going to show up in that time and secondly I think it should we it's probably going to be the first thing you are you're asked you want to build a connection with the panel in that time so they want to be able to see you well in the screen and I think also don't spend that hour trying to design a slide spend that hour thinking about what you're actually going to say because that's the bit that matters.
Yes because you could spend 30 minutes moving things around a slide it's probably not going to make any difference but I wonder also if you could just ask at this point I would probably just ask them when they because they're giving you warning for this I know you're only going to get an hour at the time but they're contacting you to say I think you could ask am I expected to create slides and because and they might say it's up to you which is fine or they might say yes we'd expect one slide or don't bother and that way you don't need to stress about whether to do it or not I think in an hour to expect you to put together like some full slide set and a presentation probably quite a lot I would guess they will indicate no I think we've had someone who's been told or given like old sort of acetate type things to try and create a present like one you've got one thing that you can do that you can show them one slide one acetate one kind of thing but I would I think they could be more specific so you could ask them but otherwise I agree don't waste your time doing slides because that you're gonna the biggest wins are going to be from delivering them great content not from a nicely designed slide in this case we're going to talk about a example for this week so this is where our students suggest examples or scenarios that they might use in their interview this week we've got one about duty of candour which is a reasonably common question that they get asked so when we look to our data on all of the questions that our academy students have been asked as they've gone through their substantive interviews this came up about 15 of the time so it's actually not the most common scenario that comes up which is the mistake one the mistake is the most common but it does come up fairly often and you should definitely have an example ready for this so what's the example that we've got to look at this week so the example of duty of candle here is I was asked to perform duty of candle for a family when the incorrect breast milk had been given to a baby on the neonatal unit so for reference there was you know various bottles of breast milk in the fridge and some breast milk was given to a baby and it turned out that it wasn't from their mum it was from a different mum okay so what do you think about this as a duty of candle example well when we talked last week about a mistake we were saying that you didn't want it to be something terrible but duty of candour is actually different because in duty of candour ideally it won't be your mistake because you want what you want is to have an example where it it happened and you were the person who was there when the mistake came to light and therefore your job is to do the duty of candour part and given that it wasn't your mistake it's actually fine if it was serious and in some ways it's better if it's more serious because then your your skills of duty of candour are more experienced because telling someone that your baby's been given the wrong breast milk it's quite a big deal versus telling them that you know you put the you mislabeled a blood sample or something which is less of a big deal it's still duty of candour but it's not as significant and so your skills in breaking difficult news and dealing with that won't be you won't be able to demonstrate them as well as you could in this example so i think it's a really nice example and it's quite simple to explain so you don't have to spend too long like you could a couple of sentences we all know what happened so yeah i think good example what do you think yeah i like it i like it a lot um and i think yeah as you say we don't want people to spend ages on the explanation um or describing what the incident is for for any of these examples because what we want them to focus on is what they did so we want them to be able to to focus on the steps that they took to address this so in this particular example um what you need to focus on is that you understand the process um so you can describe the steps that you took under duty of candour and particularly the apology around um the mistake that you delivered to the family and so part of your reflection is going to be on you know what you learned about what families need to hear in those moments um when we apologise that we've caused either them or their loved one harm um and in addition to that you need to be able to to walk uh the panel through the duty of candle process so you know i went to uh apologise to the family i explained what had happened um and i explained that there would be an investigation around this to um learn from this and to make sure this doesn't happen to another family um and then you'll talk about the um the datex and the escalation the investigation of of that um error um and then you'll talk about how you um generated some departmental learning as a result of that and then how you fed that into your organisational learning strategy um and also how you fed that learning back to the family and that is closing the loop on that duty of candle process but it all stems from an incident that's really easy for the panel to understand because you haven't spent five minutes describing this that and the other thing that happened yeah and when when it's your if it was your mistake you wouldn't really be able to do that in a couple of sentences you wouldn't be able to explain it because you'd really feel the need to explain why it happened you know it wasn't really it was very busy and you know there was two things next to each other in the fridge and someone told me it was fine and it was you know it was a Friday night in fact and you you feel the need to explain why you made the mistake and that's just only human that's only human but actually when it's not your mistake you don't have to get into that you just say it was you know it came to light when I was on you know I was in charge of the shift or whatever that this error had happened it was my job to do duty of candour and one thing that I commonly see people leave out when they practise this question is that how did you feel things so how did you feel and how did the family respond because we get like into the steps of I'm apologised and I've told them and I've said I'll do this and I rectify this and here's the pals leaflet and etc but actually you can say it was my job to do duty of candour and actually I knew this family well and so I had a good relationship with them so although I was felt a bit apprehensive about doing it because obviously I was telling them it's something that was a big deal I actually knew that I could deliver it in a way that was sensitive or you say I was quite stressed about doing this because I know this family had had other issues with the care they'd been receiving and this was just going to add kind of fuel to the fire so I was nervous about it but I've had experience doing it before and I knew I knew how to handle it so a short thing like that I think can really help the panel understand you better and it's part of that connection isn't it it's like how you go from just being someone who knows the steps of duty of candour to a human who's going to be a member of their team and the same on the other side you're telling the family you've given the wrong breast milk to their baby so what then what happens you know what did they say did they say this is outrageous this hospital is terrible you know I'm taking my baby and I'm going or did they say that's obviously not ideal really appreciate you telling me you know and what can we do to rectify it or whatever so that part helps show how you are with families as well rather than just moving on to I told them and then I reported then I did the um and so I think these two are good things to practise when you're practising the answer to make sure you fit them in yeah look I think the bottom line is we want to show the panel um that you are the person that they want on their team yeah I'm going to be somebody that can consistently deliver high quality care for our patients and families and I'm a great colleague so you need to be able to demonstrate that you are a nice warm compassionate human throughout this interview as well as somebody who knows the system and the process for dealing with whatever you deal with day to day and this duty of candour example is actually a great way to be able to bring in both of these things it can be harder and other and other questions to bring in both but this is a great one where you can great okay so good example we like that example so next we're going to look at an interview question that you might get and how to approach it so what's the what question are we looking at this week so today we are looking at how does p-surf improve patient safety okay this is quite topical right um p-surf is a new thing interview panels are testing out whether people actually know what it means yes so the thing you don't want to happen is that you then say sorry what what is p-surf which is really what you want to avoid so now now you've listened to this this you need to make sure you know about p-surf um it's there are you know are people in training who will not know about it because they haven't had experience of it you have to know about this for your consultant interview because this is another example of a question that if they ask you this and you have zero clue what p-surf is you're gonna feel embarrassed you're gonna look unprepared and yeah you're it's gonna make it more stressful than it needs to be so be duly warned so p-surf patient safety incident response framework is a new way of um looking at how we deal with incidents compared to the previous way where you risk grade stuff severe risk moderate risk minor and then the level of investigation will depend on how significant the risk was that's the way that's the system the way before but with p-surf what we're doing is trying to make a more common sense approach because actually there'll be some severe and severe risk incidents where we actually know what the learning is and there's we you know we have systems in place to address this but there also might be minor risk incidents that actually there's loads of learning from and so in the risk grading system before the minor instance didn't really need any investigation because nothing happened but actually there's opportunity there that we were missing and so p-surf is a bit is a more common sense tailored approach where you can look at each incident separately and decide whether you think it should be addressed and in what way and that is the premise of p-surf so i think we probably won't do a deeper dive into that now but i think it's good to know the essentials of it and think about you know what you know about the different ways that incidents can be dealt with and the principles of why we're dealing with them in that way and specifically we want you to be able to focus on maintaining patient safety with a very with a focus on learning and so we've removed that focus on blame that we had in the previous system so whenever you frame your answer on p-surf we want you to to really reference um the fact that you are all about the learning and maintaining safe and effective systems for our patients how would you walk through this question well i would look at themes of why p-surf was brought in in the first place so i would look at the thing i mentioned about common sense approach to looking so some minor instance might have serious learning as well i think the time frame is better than in the previous system because one of the issues before is that a lot of people had left by the time anything went through an si process people have you know half of the team had moved on to other places and then as a trainee you would be contacted about something from six months ago in a place you're no longer working and it's all a bit of a distant memory and so the learning there's a question about the utility of the learning from that and so this should be you can choose shorter more focused ways of investigating stuff and so i think that definitely means you're more responsive it's more timely and so that that improves patient safety as well and i guess the other thing is just embedding that no blame approach since it's very focused on systems not not you and what you did but actually about how to improve the system i think these are probably the key things so if you were answering a question about p serve you might take the uh the duty of candour example that we just used so you could talk about that that incident where the breast milk um was mixed up and you could talk about how you as a team had investigated that um and how you'd tried to understand what the systems and processes were around the way that you store and subsequently deliver breast milk in a way that reduces the risk or completely mitigates the risk of um mixing it up another time and and again that will be a real focus on not well who got the breast milk out of the fridge and uh gave it to the wrong baby it's much more about what is the system for how we store and deliver breast milk um to neonates so that we can actually make sure that that is safer in the future yeah agree so the bottom line is you definitely need to know about peace earth so make sure you you have a read about it because it comes up pretty commonly and it's an easy one that you could be stumped by if you if you haven't heard of it so make sure you have a look okay and then last up we've got our tip and trick of the week and this week we're looking at why you need to be clear on why you want this job in particular yeah this really matters doesn't it the panel need to know that you are applying for this job because this is the job of your dreams it's the one that you really want um now we're under no illusion we do have people coming through the academy who say to us i've been for for five interviews before i joined the academy and i didn't get any of them i just basically need a job um that's not what the panel wants to hear um very obviously um so this is about really understanding some specifics around this job and showing the panel that you really care about this that you've got some passion for this particular job so that you can build a connection with them as you move through your interview yeah and i think you need to dig deep because in the end you could say well i don't i'm you know this isn't my dream job and of course not everyone is applying for their dream job but you have to find a way to to want the job and convey that to the panel um so you you really need think like what why are you applying and what can you say what you know what it's it's not just conveying it to the panel out loud but it's actually knowing it yourself because it'll come it just comes it's so obvious if you go into an interview and you don't want the job the panel are going to smell it a mile off and then they're just it's very hard for them to want to give someone a job who isn't that bothered and everyone wants to be wanted and they they are no different they want to be loved they want you to want to be there so i would really think beforehand and be clear in your mind why you want this job and also clear in your mind that you do want this job and and persuade yourself even if it's only temporary persuade yourself this is a great opportunity for me i'm going in and i really want to get this job otherwise i think you're doing yourself a disservice and them and it's going it's going to be very clear in the interview yeah and i think you know think about things like what what is it about their team that really appeals to you what is it about the work that they do in their department that's particularly engaging for you do you really like working with um a particularly diverse patient group and they've got that um in their trust are you really enjoying um some particular type of service delivery that they're focussing on at the moment um do you admire them for their particular outcomes or whatever um so just think about what it is that connects you to this job um and be ready to to talk about it in your interview great okay so we will wrap up there and next week we're going to look at some more questions that come up and in particular we're going to look at a question about edi equality diversity and inclusion which is coming up very commonly in interviews and we will chat about that next week so see you there see you then