Outstanding Preparation for Medical Applicants

“You are the lead clinician for the orthopaedic department. You have been tasked with reducing costs by 5%, without reducing the patient throughput. What are some of the areas you might consider?”, asked Owen Ainsley, the Divisional Director, University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust. This was not the easiest question that sixteen prospective medical students were asked during their three–hour interview session on Saturday 6^th November. In fact many of the questions asked, and situations faced, during that day were challenging, and rightly so.

The school once again ran its very successful series of multi-mini interviews (MMI) both for students from the school and from Henrietta Barnett School to help them prepare for their upcoming university medical interviews. Many universities have moved away from the more traditional one-to-one or panel interviews and now run MMIs in order to, they believe, better gauge a student’s ability to react under pressure and to respond to scenarios that are unexpected – all qualities that might be expected of a medical student. All sixteen students carouselled around eight different rooms, each room housing a medical professional, and during the eight minutes they spent in each room the student was taken through a testing journey of their understanding and appreciation of a career in medicine.

One of the rooms also involved a role play which is a common form of assessment for any medical undergraduate. The areas of focus this year were: lessons learnt from work experience, scientific knowledge, expectations of a medical degree, making judgements on a series of medical scenarios, management of a hospital and the wider medical team, ethical dilemmas and, breaking and sharing difficult news. Once the interviews were finished, the students were able to listen to presentations from the medical professionals about their areas of specialisation and to discuss recent medical topics. All students then received individual written feedback about their performance within each room and given areas they could focus upon. We wish all the students the very best with their applications.

Each student was provided with detailed written feedback from each of the eight stations they visited and were given a number of short presentations from the medical professionals who had kindly spent the day helping to run the event.

Thank you to all Mill Hill County Staff who helped with the smooth running of the day and our special thanks go to Owen Ainsley, Divisional Director of University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust; Dr Oliver Boney, Consultant Anaesthetist at University College London Hospital; Dr Claire, Strauss, Paediatric Registrar, Dr Rachel Christian; Dr Vidushi Gor; Anita Patel, Medical student at Cambridge University; Vinny Simpson and Ms Hylton.

Mr Edwards

Deputy Headteacher