Consultant interview questions

  Personal

• Tell me about yourself
• How do you describe yourself?
• What are your strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?
• How would you rate yourself on a score of 1 to 10?
• How would others rate you on a score of 1 to 10?
• How do you respond to criticism?
• What are your outside interests?
• How do you relax?
• What do you do when you’re stressed?
• How do you know when you are stressed?
• What annoys you the most? How do you overcome that?
• What experiences outside of medicine have you found valuable as doctor?
• What words would you use to describe yourself?
• Describe yourself in one word. What your values?
• Are there any limitations you recognise in yourself?
• What do you think your references say?
• Why should we appoint you?
• Why should we not offer you the post?
• Tell us about 2 successful points in your life?
• How do you know you’re a good doctor?
  
  

 Motivation

• What made you come into radiology?
• Why did you pursue radiology as a career?
• What do you aspire to?
• What motivates you to come to work?
• What attracted you to this discipline?
• How do you keep up-to-date?
• Which journals do you find most useful to read?
• Tell me about a recent scientific paper you’ve read
• Tell me about a scientific paper that changed your practice recently
• What postgraduate education do you find helpful?
• What advice would you give someone who wants a career in radiology?
• Is there anyone from the medical profession that you admire?
• What do you admire in other consultants?
• Are there any areas of this specialty that you dislike?
  
  

 Your training

• Please talk me through your CV with particular reference to this job
• Tell me, with reference to your training, how you came to be sitting in front of us now?
• What experience do you have that is relevant to this post?
• What is your biggest accomplishment?
• Which of your publications are you most proud of?
• You have a very impressive CV for the job which is essentially a DGH job. Do you really want this post?
• What areas need to be addressed in your training?
• What skills do you need to acquire?
• Is there any personal and professional development support you’ll need post CCT?
• Tell me the good things about your training.
• Tell the bad things about your training.
• Looking back, what do you think of your training programme? Any particularly good or possibly poor aspects?
• If you could go back a few years, would you change the path you’ve taken up to now?
• If you could change anything about your training what would it be?
• How might you have improved your career progression?
• For what reason did you last call your consultant?
• How can you prove to me you’re safe?
• Give an example of a change you implemented in the department. How did this affect the department?
• If appointed, do you feel competent to be involved in the on-call rota?
• How have you improved practice recently within your department?
• Given an example of where you were involved in implementing a new service, and what you learnt.
  
  

  Working as a consultant

• What is the difference between being a registrar and a consultant? 
• Suppose you got this job and three months later your consultant colleagues are still treating you like a registrar. How would you handle this?
• What is your ideal job plan?
• What would be the main features of your consultant contract?
• What do you think about sabbaticals?
• What do you think about flexible working?
• To whom are you responsible as a consultant?
• What is revalidation?
• What are your views on revalidation?
• What is an appraisal?
• Is the new consultant contract a good thing?
• What makes a good consultant?
• What are clinical excellence awards for consultants?
• How do you monitor your own practise?
• How are you going to provide evidence of your good practice at your appraisal?
• How will you assess the competence of your trainees?
• Do you know of any recent changes to consenting patients?
• Has there been any change in the law regarding consent?
• What is your position regarding private practice after being appointed?
• How will you make time to approach clinical commissioning groups?
  
  

  The future

• Describe what you think you will be doing during the first six months of this post. How about the following 6 months?
• What do you want to achieve in your first 1-2 years?
• Where do you see yourself in five years time?
• Where do you want to be in five years?
• What is your ambition?
• What is the future of radiology?
• In ideal world, how would you improve your specialty?
• What do you see as the major advances in this specialty over the next few years?
• How will you introduce a new practice to the hospital?
• You want to develop a new service, but your departmental lead says no. What will you do?
• What do you think will change in this specialty in the next few years?
• How can you make the system more transparent?
• If you had £100,000 how would you spend it?
• Would you like to be a clinical director?
• How would you deliver transformational change?
  
  

 Hospital

• Why do you want to work in this region?
• Why have you chosen to apply to this hospital?
• How can you help achieve the trust plans and objectives?
• What does the mission statement of the trust mean to you?
• How would you help us reach our targets in this trust?
• How can you increase productivity for the trust?
• How would you reduce the litigation costs for the hospital?
• How many jobs have you applied for?
• How will you bring extra income value into the trust?
• What is your impression of this hospital?
• What you know about the culture of this organisation? How will you support this?
• How would you improve the technology in this trust?
• Will you be better suited working in another hospital?
• What do you know about the links the radiology department has with the university?
• If you could change anything about the links the radiology department has with the university, what would it be?
• What do you think about travelling between different hospital sites?
• Can you describe a clinical governance issue working at two sites?
• How would you develop services across two sites? 
• Have you read our financial report on our website? What do you think?
  
  

 Radiology department

• What weaknesses are there in this department?
• What are the strengths of this department?
• What 3 changes would you make to the department?
• What would you like to change in this department in the next few years and how would you go about doing this?
• How would you use clinical governance to improve effective working within this department?
• What clinical risks are there in this department?
• How will you address long waiting lists?
• What skills will you bring to this department?
• What qualities can you bring to this post?
• How can we make this department more attractive to other consultants?
• How would you implement a new guideline in this department?
• The department has overspent. How will you try to make savings?
• How will you save money in this department? What area(s) would you focus on?
• How can we manage services in the department on a smaller budget in the current financial climate?
• Your department is in the red and you need to lose staff. How do you do it?
• Give an example of a change you’ll propose to make this radiology department more efficient?
• How can you improve the quality of a service without increasing cost?
• How would you save the department £1 million?
• How do you ‘sell’ your department to the local clinical commissioning group?
• How do you negotiate with a local clinical commissioning group for a particular service in your department?
  
  

  Teaching

• If you’re in charge of training for your specialty, is there anything you would change?
• If you were in charge of all funding for training in this region, what changes would you make?
• If the numbers of trainees were going to increase and you were given more funding, how would you spend it?
• How do you know you are a good teacher?
• What are the qualities of a good teacher?
• How do you arrange medical teaching?
• What do you feel about student, SHO or registrar teaching?
• If you could change one thing about registrar training what would it be?
  
  

  Management and Leadership

• What do you think are the differences between a manager and a leader? Which one are you?
• What makes you a good leader?
• Which qualities do you think you possesses that make you a good leader?
• Can you give any examples of situations where you demonstrated leadership skills?
• What are your thoughts about the clinical leadership competency framework?
• What is your leadership style?
• What sort of manager would you be?
• Should doctors be managers?
• How do you motivate people?
• Do you think working in a team is important?
• Tell me when you last worked in a team. What went well and what didn’t go so well?
• What part does teamwork play in practice?
• What members of the team do you think are most important?
• What do you think about multidisciplinary teams?
• You want to implement a plan. How would you go about doing this?
• How do you delegate?
• I see you’ve been on a management course. What did you learn about yourself?
  
  

 Research and audit

• Tell me about your involvement in research
• What have you learned from your research?
• Are you involved in research? If not would you assist others? If yes, what area would you like to review/research and why? What features attracted to this area?
• Which of your papers are you most satisfied with and why?
• Which of your papers are applicable to the area you’re interested in?
• How will you find the time to research in this new job plan?
• How are you going to find money for research?
• What is research governance?
• Have you set up a research project?
• Should all trainees be involved in research?
• Is research necessary for consultants?
• What do you understand my evidence based medicine?
• What are your views on evidence based medicine?
• Tell me about a controversial piece of research you are aware of
• How does research affect your daily practice?
• What is the difference between audit and research?
• What are your views on clinical audit?
• Tell me about your involvement in audit? How did your audit change practice?
• How has audit changed your practice?
• Tell me about audits you’ve been involved in.
• How can you show you’re providing a quality service?
• What was the last paper you read that changed the way you managed something?
  
  

 Patients

• How do patients describe you?
• Have you been involved in any complaints procedures?
• How do you handle a personal complaint?
• How did you handle the last complaint you received about your service?
• Tell me about some patient feedback you had?
• A patient disagrees with your treatment plan. How are you going to respond?
• Sometimes patients can pose challenges, particularly when disabled, for example positioning them for a clinical examination. How would you ensure your trainees are safe when dealing with challenging patients?
• How do you insure your trainees treat patients with respect?
• How do you describe your job to layperson in a pub?
• A patient demands a particular radiological procedure and you’re certain that the procedure is not right for him/her. How do you go about explaining this to him/her? The patient is still adamant!
• If you found my mobile phone with a video of a patient on, what would you do? What if I said the patient had given consent?
• What role can patients have in planning service development?
• Have you worked with patients to improve a service?
  
  

 Difficult scenarios

• What was your last mistake?
• Have you ever made any mistakes? What happened and what did you learn from it?
• Tell me about a serious untoward incident you’ve been involved with
• How do you resolve a disagreement?
• What conflicts may you encounter in this post and what will you do to minimise/prevent them?
• Tell me about the most difficult decision you had to take in the last 2 years
• Tell us about a difficult situation that you had to deal with recently?
• Tell me about a difficult situation involving a patient?
• Given example of how you managed a difficult situation?
• One of your consultant colleagues is underperforming. How do you deal with this situation?
• How would you deal with a colleague who is dangerous?
• You’re asked to investigate a colleague’s practise which you have been told is dangerous. How do you proceed?
• You disagree with a consultant colleague’s over-diagnosis. How do you manage this scenario?
• How do you approach an underperforming member of staff?
• You are given reports of a colleague turning up to work under the influence of alcohol? What do you do?
• When faced with a registrar who is underperforming, what action would you take?
• What if a junior doctor confided to me that one of your colleagues had made inappropriate advances? What would you do?
• Tell me about a disagreement you had with a colleague and how you resolved it?
• Give an example of a conflict situation with a colleague and how you managed it.
• It has become well known that two consultant surgeons you work with do not get along with each other. A patient has asked your views regarding this and their up-coming operation. How do you respond?
• How do you deal with a colleague with power and authority, who has been undermining your confidence?
  
  

  NHS

• What do you think about private sector involvement in the NHS?
• What do you understand by the term foundation hospital?
• What are the advantages of being a foundation trust? Are there any disadvantages?
• What do you think of independent sector treatment centres?
• How do National Service Frameworks affect your practice?
• How do you feel about performance related pay?
• Are national performance indicators of any value?
• How can you help us meet NHS targets?
• What are your views about the recent financial cuts?
• What do you understand by clinical governance?
• What are your views on clinical governance?
• What do you think about the modernising medical careers?
• Do you think the NHS constitution is a good thing?
• What do you think of the Robert Francis Report of the mid Staffordshire NHS trust?
• Has the Francis report changed our practice?
• What do you think about the national programme for IT?
• Tell me how the Francis / Berwick / Tooke / Darzi reports affect your daily practise.
• What do you think of The Health and Social Care Bill / NHS Commissioning / Care Quality Commission / service line reporting?
• If Matt Hancock / Lord Darzi walked into the room now, what would you ask him?
• How do you feel about GMC reforms, accreditation and revalidation?
• What do you think about the European working time directive?
  
  

  Radiology nationally

• There is a shortage of radiologists. What do you propose to do about this?
• What is your view on specialist nurses in your discipline?
• What do you think about reporting radiographers?
• Do you think we should be training more reporting radiographers?
• Do you think out-sourcing is important?
• Do you think in-sourcing is important?
• Would you like to become involved in Royal College of Radiologist groups or committees?