Training Blog

Most people would not even consider taking an exam without acquiring the relevant knowledge, skills and insight in preparation for it and therefore why would you approach perhaps one of the most important events in your life, getting the right consultant job, with any greater uncertainty than there needs to be? You wouldn’t. In fact, we know that you’d want to absolutely ensure you stood the best possible chance of success and that is why we have developed the Medicology approach to consultant interview success. It’s your future and so we don’t believe you should take any more chances than necessary.

The Medicology approach consists of the following:

• Gold standard, low number, specialty-specific consultant interview course
• Access to consultantinterviews.co.uk, allowing you to see example questions, hot topics, key strategies, CV guidance and more
• Psychological profiling to understand your likely strengths and weaknesses, as well as their match to your specialty
• Back up coaching – fail to get appointed on 4 occasions and we’ll examine the reasons why, as well as coach you to success

CONSULTANT INTERVIEW SKILLS OPEN PROGRAMME

Pre-Interview visits – creating personal presence & deriving benefit
Understanding your consultant interview panel
Building rapport with interviewers
Effective communication skills within interviews
Advanced interview techniques
Psychological techniques for increased rapport, impact & clarity
Understanding the reasoning behind the question
Answering questions within the context of who’s asking – understanding the interviewer
Recognising the effects of your internal wiring on your approach to answering questions
Effectively structuring your answers
Talking about yourself & showing the real you – do & don’t guidance
The answers you must have – knowing what to research
Handling difficult or unexpected questions
Dealing with ethical questions
Dealing with political questions
Developing business or commercial healthcare knowledge
Effective presentation skills
Demonstrating initiative, personality, leadership and political awareness
Understanding your body language
Question practice with a 1:6 instructor-participant ratio

Benefits and objectives

• Get the best jobs by adopting the right strategies for your specific specialty
• Develop appropriate confidence in all interview situations
• Communicate in the right language and with the appropriate degree of confidence for your specialty
• Utilise the full range of interview strategies to influence the result
• Increase awareness of the necessary key topics
• Gain valuable practice and personal feedback

Course type and teaching methods

The course consists of an engaging mixture of delivery styles including lectures, discussions and exercises all designed to ensure you the highest possible success in your future consultant interview. A substantial component of the afternoon is dedicated to interview practice in groups of 6 people with each person having individual mock interview questions in front of the small group. This structure is extremely successful in recreating the pressures of a real interview whilst giving each person the opportunity to rehearse in a safe environment whilst receiving valuable feed back from a trained facilitator and the small group of fellow attendees. All candidates learn from listening to others answers, reflection and tutor feedback. Topics covered include the political agenda, clinical governance, ethical decisions, clinical leadership, dealing with difficult colleagues, conflict, supporting junior doctors and teaching. These sessions are facilitated by senior Medicology coaches and by experienced, trained consultants with direct experience of interviewing for consultant colleagues.

Senior doctors are calling for human tissue to be routinely kept for genetic testing in cases where young people die without explanation. It is thought that the DNA from such samples may reveal an unsuspected inherited condition and save relatives’ lives. One doctor said pathologists should be encouraged to take the tissue and ask for consent later if necessary.

But the Human Tissue Authority said it was “alarmed” about public calls for practitioners to break the law.
The Human Tissue Act requires that appropriate consent is in place before the tissue is removed from a deceased person. During the implementation of the Coroners and Justice Bill we will consider the additional procedures that might be required to enable families’ wishes in this respect to be achievedquote here
Ministry of Justice spolesperson

Dr Mary Sheppard, of the Royal Society of Medicine’s pathology section and a leading expert on Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD), said some coroners did ask relatives already but others felt it was not part of their remit. She said: “If coroners routinely requested consent from the family to retain material for DNA testing at autopsies we would be able to find out far more about how the person died and possibly prevent other deaths in the same family.” She estimates that every year roughly 800 young people under the age of 35, apparently fit and healthy, die suddenly from unsuspected heart disease or without explanation.

The government has recently set up a database operated by the NHS Information Centre to collect reliable data from pathologists on these deaths.

• Inherited heart problems that can cause SCD:
• Long QT syndrome – a disorder of the electrical activity of the heart
• Brugada Syndrome- irregularities of the electrical activity of the heart
• Inherited cardiomyopathies or heart muscle diseases

Coroners are in charge of inquests and post mortem examinations and overseen by the Ministry of Justice.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said: “We recognise that some families who lose their loved ones tragically early would want a more extensive post mortem than is usually required by a coroner whose duty is to establish the cause of death. “During the implementation of the Coroners and Justice Bill we will consider the additional procedures that might be required to enable families’ wishes in this respect to be achieved. More generally, and in relation to specific research projects, the new Chief Coroner is expected to issue guidance on the handling for all requests relating to research into the causes of deaths which coroners investigate, and to provide advice to coroners on how they may or may not be able to co-operate.”

Alison Cox, founder and chief executive of the charity Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) said: “In the past two years we have seen the coroners taking huge steps to support families after the tragedy of a young sudden cardiac death. “DNA testing is clearly a potential resource for further information when it is possible to obtain it.”

Dr Paul Brennan, a clinical geneticist for the Northern Genetics Service, said there should be a change to coroners’ forms to deal specifically with consent for the pathologist to retain tissue for DNA extraction and storage. He said: “Until then, I would urge pathologists who have not had the opportunity to obtain consent, to think about taking these tiny tissue samples – usually a spoonful of blood or a cubic centimetre of spleen tissue – and then ask the relatives for consent. “If consent is not given, the tissue must, by law, be destroyed. But if it is not even taken in the first place, a huge potential benefit is lost.”

Adrian McNeil, chief executive of the Human Tissue Authority (HTA) said: “The HTA is alarmed about any public statement that urges practitioners to consider breaking the law governing consent and the taking of tissue for DNA testing. “We recognise Dr Brennan’s right, as a senior practitioner in the sector, to propose changes to the current law but cannot endorse what would be a clear breach of the legislation.”

Morale is one of the most significant factors affecting organisational performance with clear links to many adverse situations:

• High sickness & absence
• High staff turnover
• Poor performance
• Poor clinical outcome
• Low customer satisfaction ratings
• Reduced team effectiveness
• Conflict & obstruction
• Increased tribunals & grievances

Medicology MTI has been developed to address two specific needs:

a robust and sensitive measure of morale
a differential diagnosis of the factors positively or negatively influencing it

It consists of a series of questions around known influencing factors and takes the average person around 10 minutes to complete.

Robust Measure

Medicology MTI introduces two important processes to ensure that the morale measurement returned is both sensitive and representative.

Firstly, it utilises variance to assess morale, i.e. how far above of below neutral the score for a particular factor is for that person and thus avoids the weakness found in many systems that use an arbitrary scale.

Secondly, it asks the respondent to indicate how important a factor is and this is taken into account in the overall calculation. Coupled with variance, this creates an immensely sensitive measure.

Differential Diagnosis

Medicology MTI is designed to provide detailed analysis, reporting and guidance. Your morale report will include analysis by:

• overall score
• individual questions
• different staffing groups or departments

Furthermore, individual questions contribute to section morale scores, to help you identify problems in the following areas:

• Growth & Development
• Leadership & Management
• Personal Factors
• Relationships
• Work (the work itself)
• Workplace (the work environment)

This level of analysis and reporting allows you to not only assess morale in different staff groups but to diagnose any specific problem areas so that interventions may be applied.

Practical Information

Medicology MTI is designed to make your life easy:

• Run morale testing from a few to thousands swiftly and effortlessly
• Define which staff groups are most appropriate to you
• Re-run the survey at intervals (which can be set up automatically e.g. 3 monthly intervals) to assess how it is changing over time
• Bulk upload your staff from Microsoft Excel® or provide them to us and we’ll do it

For more information or to try out this great product for yourself see medicology mti

medicalperception.com from Medicology Ltd allows Trusts, PCTs, SHAs, Government, Pharmaceutical, Medical Equipment & Biotech companies, health service suppliers and more to access, survey and evaluate the mindset of health service staff, simply and cost-effectively. Medicology Ltd is also the leading provider of leadership, management and personal development for health service professionals, especially clinicians, meaning we spend most of our lives inside the heads of clinical staff, understanding how they think, how they evaluate problems, their similarities and differences from each other, their sources of meaning and more. That’s a very, very good place to be when designing meaningful, high quality research.

What can we do?

• Survey health professionals in every medical specialty
• Access the medical mind nationally and internationally
• Evaluate clinical perceptions around drug therapies
• Gauge perceptions and feelings about important issues
• Develop insight into clinical pathways
• Understand how professionals choose products & services
• Develop greater sales force effectiveness
• Evaluate job satisfaction & morale
• Run a series of evaluations over time

This is just a brief set of suggestions, so if you need something not on the list then simply ask.

Why medicalperception.com?

There are very compelling reasons to use medicalperception.com

• Highly cost-effective for the highest quality research
• Rapid deployment time
• Professional outward appearance
• Ability to retain and re-run research studies, gaining insight into trends over time
• Build in the ability to control for different psychologies
• Highly trusted, competent team
• Enormous degree of medical insight available in study design

Experts are warning that poor communication between hospital staff and with their patients is far too common and deeply damaging. According to the findings of a confidential review patients left out of the loop and staff clocking on and off without a handover was commonplace. Change in the hospital team structure over recent years has seen individual clinicians become “transient acquaintances during a patient’s illness rather than having responsibility for continuity of care”, says the NCEPOD report. It found a co-ordinated handover of patients between night and day staff only occurred in a quarter of the teams. In 13.5% of cases lack of communication compromised continuity of patient care.

In just over half (53%) of cases there was an apparent lack of input from senior doctors “leading to delays in giving patients timely and appropriate care”, report author and surgeon Ian Martin said. And 30% of the patients were not seen by a consultant within the recommended 12 hours after admission. In a fifth of patients who were not expected to survive on admission there was no evidence of any discussion between the health care team and either the patient or relatives on treatment limitation. Many “do not attempt resuscitation” orders were signed by very junior trainee doctors. NCEPOD chairman Professor Tom Treasure said the report vividly revealed the challenge medical teams face in making the transition between saving life and allowing natural death. “It should be ensured that patients achieve the best quality of life until they die. Effective team working and communication with patients, relatives and carers are fundamental to getting this right.”

Director of the Patients Association, Katherine Murphy, said: “These findings run the risk of undermining basic confidence in the NHS. Some of the examples are shocking. “NCEPOD is the nearest the NHS has to airline ‘near miss reporting’. Its findings must be acted upon, or problems will continue to plague vulnerable patients and their families.” John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said doctors had long been concerned that the loss of team working in hospitals had fuelled the risk of poor communication, and sub-standard patient care. He said the implementation of a 48-hour working week under the European Working Time Directive almost certainly meant that the problem had got worse since the latest study was carried out. Professor Black said the only way to address the problem was to opt out of the directive.

A Department of Health spokesperson said measures had been introduced to improve care – including an end of life strategy – since the report’s survey was carried out. “We are putting in place an extensive programme of health and social care training to support end of life care provision, including pilot projects to support the development of communication skills. He added that evidence from hospitals already implementing a 48-hour week showed a drop in mortality and no evidence of harm to patients. “Working together with the local NHS and the Royal Colleges we have set up a rigorous quality assurance process to give us an accurate picture of how EWTD is being implemented and so we can provide support where it is needed.”

Experts are warning that the cost of treating the growing number of people drinking heavily threatens to cripple NHS hospitals. If the trend continues the burden will be unsustainable with a quarter of England’s population consuming hazardous amounts, alcohol addiction already costs the NHS more than £2.7 billion a year.

The report claims that hospital care alone cannot solve the problem, but increasing out-of-hospital provision could be more cost effective. This would include GPs screening and counselling their patients on alcohol misuse. Trials suggest that brief advice from a GP, or practice nurse, leads to one in eight people reducing their drinking to within sensible levels. This, says the report, compares well with smoking cessation, where only one in 20 change their behaviour, changing the way alcohol-related services are delivered could save hospitals 1,000 bed days and Primary Care Trusts up to £650,000 a year, experts estimate.

Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: “The nation’s growing addiction to alcohol is putting an immense strain on health services, especially in hospitals, costing the NHS over £2.7 billion each year.” And this sum has doubled in under five years. “This burden is no longer sustainable,” he said. “The role of the NHS should not just be about treating the consequences of alcohol related-harm but also about active prevention, early intervention, and working in partnership with services in local communities to raise awareness of alcohol-related harm.”

Steve Barnett, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “We hope this report helps to outline the scale of the problems facing the NHS and acts as a warning that if we carry on drinking in the way that we are currently, the bar bill will be paid in worse health and a health system struggling to cope.”

Two thirds of PCTs have adopted reducing alcohol-related hospital admissions as a local priority for the first time. “The department is providing Primary Care Trusts with the support, tools and incentives to deliver alcohol services in their own areas effectively according to local needs.”