Radiology ST1 Interview

For a taste of what may be expected, here are details of the some interview topics used in previous years:

Understanding of the specialty (“why radiology”?)

Interviewers are likely to evaulate a candidates ability to understand and discuss pertinent topics in radiology. They may ask about your experience of radiology (including your taster week) and previous training experience including how your previous experience has equipped you for radiology training.  If you are transferring to radiology from another specialty, for example core surgical training, they often want to know why you changed your mind and how you think you’ll cope with going back a few seniority grades. They may ask you to talk about your commitment to radiology.  They may try to find out how much you know about clinical radiology training including questions about the FRCR examinations, stress, the different types of training programmes and radiology academies.  A good understanding of what you’re getting yourself into is essential!  There may also be questions about current issues facing radiology including dealing with excessive workload, MDT meetings, skills mix and teleradiology to name a few. In summary, questions will proably be aimed at the following broad areas:

• The training scheme (how they vary across the country, exams, life as a trainee etc)
• Life as a consultant (challenges to the field, day-to-day working as a cosultant etc)
• Exposure to the specialty (your experience, taster weeks, radiology projects etc)

Knowledge and personal skills

Interviewers may ask a question to assess your personal skills. This will be taken straight from the essential criteria of the person specification and may include questions to assess any of the following:

• Communication skills
• Problem solving and decision making
• Empathy and sensitivity
• Managing others and team involvement
• Organisation and planning (prioritising time, information, workload etc)
• Vigilance and situational awareness
• Coping with pressure and managing uncertainty
• NHS Values

You could be asked to critique audit, research, radiology reports/requests etc and anything you may have read in the preparation station. You need to show a good understanding of the principles of audit and research, particularly with regard to some of the issues and difficulties facing radiology in particular.

You may be asked about your own audits and if there was any radiology component to them. It is important to do a radiology audit as this shows that you are aware of clinical governance (which is an important part of the person specification) and that you have taken the time to complete a project in your chosen career area.

You may be asked about teaching and any feedback you received.

They may also give you a clinical scenario to see how you respond.  An example would be a colleague picking up a significant incidental finding on a scan and asking you how you would manage this.  Another example is critiquing a radiology report and how you would respond.

Prioritisation of clinical scenarios

You may be asked questions about a clinical scenario and how you would deal with this. For example you may be given a radiology report to poritorise and you will need to decide what to do next based on the report.

You may be asked to prioritise a series of clinical referrals or imaging requests. These may be of mixed urgency, modalities and of variable quality in terms of information you are given. The interviewers will want you to explain your reasoning as to why you choose the order you did. You would have a short time to read the scenario, then time to answer questions regarding the scenario.

For example, the question could be “please tell usin order of priority which scan you would ask to be performed from first to last. Please explain why”:

• 26F, CTPA request, ICU patient with BP 85/51mmHg, on 40% oxygen.
• 86F, CT CAP request, staging scan for colon cancer.
• 17F, CT CAP request, RIF pain and temperature for 2 days.
• 58M, CT head request, has fallen and hit his head, on Warfarin for AF. GCS 15/15.
• 49M, CT Trauma request, was in a motorcycle collision, BP 89/56mmHg and has had 3 units RBC transfused so far.

Ethical scenarios

Given this may be covered to an extent in the MSRA, this is probably less likely to be covered here, however you may be asked to discuss and work through a number of clinical scenarios with particular professional and ethical issues.  The interviewer will be interested in how you would respond to them. Examples include:

• Professional behaviour
• Working with colleagues
• Consent issues
• Radiation protection incidents (wrong patient, overdose etc…)
• Serious unexpected findings
• Difficult family and friends issues
• Inappropriate patient behaviour
• etc…

Other questions

Interviewers will usually always ask at the end whether you have any other questions you would like to ask or if you had any comments for the interviewers. It is worth preparing for this too.