24th May 2024
One of the foundational elements you need to prepare for during your medical school interview is the NHS values. The 6 core values of the NHS should be weaved into your interview answers to show you understand the importance of the pillars the NHS is built on.
This guide explains each of the 6 NHS core values in detail, including ways to mention them in your medical school interview answers. Let’s delve into the NHS core values and why they are important.
The NHS core values are a set of areas the NHS focuses on to ensure the best possible care for all their patients. The 6 NHS values are:
Everyone who comes to the NHS should be treated with respect, whether they are patients, staff or family members. Respect and dignity encompasses the understanding that every patient is different and should be treated with respect, regardless of their preferences or beliefs. This includes respecting the opinions of others, their needs and their privacy.
The patient always comes first, so listening to their wishes and thoughts will ensure they feel seen and heard. If a doctor were to ignore the patient’s feelings completely, the patient would no longer have autonomy.
The practice of medicine has come under scrutiny previously, with many feeling as though “doctor is always right”. To ensure this changes, it is important that you uphold the NHS core value of respect and dignity to emphasise that it is the patient that comes first.
The NHS value of respect and dignity can be weaved into your medical school interview in a few ways. For example, you could prepare for your interview by thinking of examples of when you have seen doctors, during your work experience, respecting a patient’s wishes, when nurses have preserved a patient’s dignity or how you have treated your colleagues with kindness and listened to their opinions.
The NHS should always provide the highest-quality care. To ensure this, clinical audits are conducted to measure whether the quality of the current care patients are receiving matches the gold standard the NHS sets.
If evidence suggests that the quality of care is not up to standard, changes will be made to transform the way healthcare is provided. Another way to measure the quality of care the NHS provides is to ask for feedback from patients, family members, carers, or staff at the healthcare facility. This shows that the NHS cares about the opinions of service users and staff, and effective changes can be made to benefit everyone.
This is an easier NHS value to incorporate into your medical school interview answers as it can be purely evidence-based. For example, you could talk about examples of the way your local GP or hospital collects feedback from patients and staff.
Additionally, you could also provide an example of when you took an extra step to ensure you were providing the best quality of care to a patient during your work experience. This can be anything from ensuring you remembered a patient’s tea or coffee order to recalling a patient’s specific interests to add a personal touch.
A self-explanatory NHS value, compassion ensures each staff member puts themselves in the patient’s shoes and treats them how they would like to be treated. Visiting a hospital can be a stressful time for many people. Treating each patient with compassion can help put them at ease in an unfamiliar place.
The best way to mention compassion in your med school interview is to pull some examples from your work experience or volunteering. Was there a time when you gave extra care to a particularly scared patient or went above and beyond to help a fellow colleague?
If you cannot think of an example from your work experience, you can also provide an example from your personal life. This could be consoling a friend when upset or listening to someone with a problem.
Although many people come to the NHS to receive help for their immediate problems, you should also consider how their injury or diagnosis might affect their whole life. For example, if a patient comes in with a broken leg, you should not only think about helping with the broken leg but also how it might affect their mental health, work, and relationships. This NHS value focuses on providing the best treatment for the patient while considering their current situation.
Improving lives isn’t just about helping those who come into the NHS and the general public. By creating leaflets and TV adverts, the NHS encourages people to live healthier lives to prevent them from developing diseases.
To weave the core NHS value of improving lives into your interview answers, you could provide examples of when you met a patient who had a disease and how that affected their whole life, or you could explain how you have done something to promote healthier lifestyles in your community.
Working together makes sure all staff provide the best possible care for their patients. This includes collaborating with other staff members or departments to ensure patients are well looked after. Essentially, as a doctor, you should be putting the needs of a patient above anything else.
You have probably seen an example of this in your work experience. Whether it was a doctor working with nurses to provide care for a patient or even GPs communicating with the reception staff, any example of teamwork and communication will effectively address this NHS value in your interview.
This final NHS value focuses on equality and inclusion. Everyone who comes into the NHS should feel valued regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality. By recognising the diversity of patients and staff, services should be tailored to meet the specific needs of everyone. This value also focuses on distributive justice and the fair allocation of resources to patients.
BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) patients have seen inequality when it comes to receiving healthcare, so recognising this in your interview can show you understand current topics in the NHS. You can also provide examples of if you have seen an instance when a doctor has to make a decision to prioritise one group of patients over another and what the thinking process behind this was.
Just like any interview, it is a good idea to prepare some examples of your own experience of the NHS core values so you can weave them into your medical school interview answers. Here are some more tips for incorporating the values of the NHS into your interview:
The medical school interview process can be daunting but with practice, you will be able to answer any interview question with confidence. Displaying your understanding of the NHS core values shows interviewers you have taken the time to prepare and have a good knowledge base of the NHS and what it stands for.
If you are at the beginning of your medical school application and need some medical work experience, you have come to the right place! At PreMed Projects, we offer in-person and online medical work experience to ensure you tick all the boxes of your med school application. Apply online today to start your journey to medical school.
The NHS strives to ensure they provide a high standard of service to all. The values of the NHS are used to hold themselves accountable for this. By having these 6 NHS core values, every patient, family member and member of staff will have a set of expectations that should be met.
The NHS 6 core values are:
The 6 C’s in health and social care differ from the NHS values. The 6 C’s are:
During your medical school interview, you should make sure not to confuse the 6 C’s of health and social care with the core NHS values!
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