Situational judgement questions will come up on the UCAT and in your MMI interview. We give you some tips to answer confidently, quickly and accurately.

Situational judgement covers a large number of topics. A common source for examiners to create UCAT questions from is the GMC guidance ‘Good Medical Practice’. The first item this document mentions when describing what you will do as a good doctor is ‘make the care of your patient your first concern’.

This is a rather broad area but questions from this do crop up frequently on the UCAT exam and you need to know some rules and concepts so that you can answer questions quickly, accurately and confidently. We teach situational judgement on our UCAT and MMI interview courses.

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Here are some tips on how you can answer questions that ‘make the patient your first concern’

All decisions that you make should benefit the patient first (followed by your colleagues second and yourself last).

You will usually be given a scenario where something (usually medically not relevant) is about to happen in your life, but then something from a patient comes up that needs seeing straight away. For example, they could say you have a train to catch, or a wedding to attend and ask whether you will do this or see that patient that is feeling unwell or getting worse.

Patient safety first

Here someone is doing something that is compromising patient safety, either directly (not washing hands properly for example) or indirectly (for example smoking on the ward). They can complicate things by making the person who is compromising patient safety linked with you in some way, for example saying that they are your supervisor or consultant.

If you see something going wrong you need to raise this

If it is not you doing something wrong, but you see someone else doing this (usually a fellow medical student or doctor) you need to try and correct what you have seen (if you can) or inform the relevant person if you can’t do this yourself (or if the person persists in the wrong action). Be careful of inappropriate over escalation though.

Take responsibility if you are at fault

Don’t hide your mistakes. You must own up if you have done something wrong, even if it may mean harm to your own professional reputation. You must never cover up, even for your colleagues. An example of this may be a patient given the wrong dose or wrong medication which may in itself not have had any adverse effect, but attempts are made to hide the mistake.

Don’t impose your own beliefs on patients

You may have certain views on certain medical and non-medical topics, for example abortion or euthanasia. The safest way to answer these is to follow the law of the UK and guidance from the GMC. You are allowed to ‘consciously object’ to be involved in certain treatments but that is for another blog.

This is not the last you will see of situational judgement. It will crop up again in your medical school interview, in medical school and during your professional life. Our UCAT and interview courses cover situational judgement at the level needed at your medical school application state. Click below to learn more.

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