The Hidden Truth About Why Presentations Trip Up Strong NHS Consultant Interview Candidates

Hello and welcome to the Ace Your Consultant Interview podcast. I'm Tessa Davis.

And I'm Becky Platt.

And if you're a final year trainee or a locum consultant and you want to prep, not panic, then you're in the right place. Welcome to our Ace Your Consultant Interview podcast, where Becky and I will be chatting about common things that might come up for you during your NHS consultant prep. It is based on our experience of coaching over 1,000 students through their NHS substantive consultant interviews. So, we're going to start off with a question of the week, which is a question that's been put to us by our Academy students. So, what have we got this week, Becky?

Yeah, okay. So, this is a student who's asked us about their interview presentation. They've been told that they're going to be called at 8 AM and given the title of a 5-minute presentation that they need to prepare, and their interview is at 9 AM. So, they've got 1 hour to Prepare a presentation. Right, Tessa, how would you approach this?

I think that's pretty stressful. I think the first thing is to acknowledge that is a bit stressful. So, presentations, I would say, happen in about half of consultant interviews. So, not everyone will get a presentation. And the vast majority, I'm going to say 90% or more, get their question a week or two before. And the question is normally related to future future vision of the department or service. But getting it an hour before is stressful. I think you need to acknowledge that everyone's in the same boat is the first thing. So, every candidate will also be getting it at 8:00 AM. So, you all have a short time to prep, and you need to be focused in that time. So, you know before it's going to happen. So, I think, by the sounds of this question, it's an online presentation. I don't know. Well, they're getting a full 180, I assume.

I think that's what it was.

Okay. So, you're going to be in your own environment. You know you've got an hour. Clear all notifications, clutter. You need to focus in that hour, and you need to use it wisely. They will give you the question, very likely to be about future goals and vision. So, think about the stuff that you've learned in your pre-interview meetings. And we talked about this last week, but thinking about the gold that they have given you in the pre-interview meetings is exactly what you should be putting in this. And one important thing I think for thinking about presentations is it's not just what you think the future vision should be of the department or what you think you want to tell them, but it's actually thinking about what they want to hear. So if it was me and I had an hour, I would spend the first 10 minutes thinking, if I was on the panel, And I ask this question, what is it that I'm wanting to hear from the candidate? Because I think that helps just flip your perspective.

Yeah, I think so. And I think, yeah, as, as you say, if you've heard things from, um, the pre-interview meeting, absolutely slot that in. If you— if there are people on the panel that you know have certain priorities or certain areas of interest, then you need to give Give them some nuggets in that answer. There needs to be something in there for everyone.

Yeah. And it's not suggesting something that you know isn't in keeping with what they want. There's no point in you saying you want to develop a new service for whatever, the vision is that the department should have a service for whatever, when actually the context is that they had that and they scrapped it, or they talked about it and they decided that they're not going to do that, or they've got it already. So, if you pick things that show that you haven't really done your due diligence, then I think it can start you off on the wrong footing. So, it's really make sure that the stuff that you're sharing is actually relevant to them and shows all the work you've done in checking out who they are and understanding them and knowing them beforehand. Then I guess it's also bringing in your skills as well. So, it's not just, this is what I think a great vision for your department would be, but also remember you're applying for a job there. So, part of it is, well, why are you going to help them achieve that? And that's where you bring in your unique selling points and what your experience is of these areas that you've picked. And so it's this— it's not the golden triad essentially is to answer their question, but to do it with things that are related to them and tailored to them, and also things that you can bring. And it can be hard. It's not that you will necessarily be able to have all of these things for every single point. But if you can do that, That's gold, but 5 minutes is a short length of time. So what do you reckon timing-wise there, Becky?

I think with these 5-minute presentations, I really think of them as, um, an interview question, uh, that you already knew the answer to, that you already knew in advance.

Yeah.

Um, so I would structure it in the same way that I would structure any other interview question, really. And, and by that I mean providing an introduction to what you're going to do, 3 clear points that you're going to address during that answer, and you can signpost the panel to those and then come back to an answer, to a summary at the end. So I think don't make it any more complicated than that. Just stick to a clear structure that you already know.

Yeah, because you're not— you can't get much done in 5 minutes, really. Like, it's essentially a slightly longer than average interview answer. That's it. And if you try to do too much, you're risking getting cut off.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that's hard. Timing-wise, I would guess they would give you a bit of leeway with only an hour's notice, because how could you have timed it? You can't time it to perfection. But yeah, you can't have a 10-minute presentation. So you're going to have to make sure that you've got 3 points. You're going to have about a minute to talk about each point. So it's not a long time. And so it's really choosing what you choose to share carefully in that time. So cut out all the unnecessary fluff and just pack it in with the specifics and clarity that you're answering their question. What do you think about slides? I don't know. I don't think in this question they said whether they'd been told to do slides or not do slides?

No, there was no guidance on slides. I personally would go slide-free for this. I think, first of all, it's 5 minutes. I don't want to be faffing around sharing my screen and worrying that my slides aren't going to show up in that time. Secondly, I think it should—

we—

it's probably going to be the first thing you are— you're asked. You want to build a connection with the panel in that So they want to be able to see you well in the screen. And I think also, don't spend that hour trying to design a slide. Spend that hour thinking about what you're actually going to say, because that's the bit that matters.

Yes, because you could spend 30 minutes moving things around a slide. It's probably not going to make any difference. But I wonder also if you could just ask at this point, I would probably just ask them when they— because they're giving you warning. warning for this. I know you're only going to get an hour at the time, but they're contacting you to say— I think you could ask, am I expected to create slides?

Yeah.

And they might say it's up to you, which is fine, or they might say, yes, we'd expect one slide, or don't bother. And that way you don't need to stress about whether to do it or not. I think in an hour to expect you to put together some full slide set and a presentation is probably quite a lot. I would guess they will indicate no. I think we've had someone who's been told, are given old acetate-type things to try and create a— you've got one thing that you can do that you can show them, one slide, one acetate, one kind of thing. But I think they could be more specific. So you could ask them. But otherwise, I agree, don't waste your time doing slides because the biggest wins are going to be from delivering them great content. Not from a nicely designed slide, in this case. We're going to talk about an example for this week. So this is where our students suggest examples or scenarios that they might use in their interview. This week, we've got one about duty of candor, which is a reasonably common question that they get asked. So when we looked at our data on all of the questions that our Academy students have been asked as they've gone through their substantive interviews, this came up about 15% of the time. So it's actually not the most common scenario that comes up. Which is the mistake one. The mistake's the most common, but it does come up fairly often, and you should definitely have an example ready for this. So what's the example that we've got to look at this week?

So the example of duty of candour here is, I was asked to perform duty of candour for a family when the incorrect breast milk had been given to a baby on the neonatal unit. So for reference, there was, you know, various bottles of breast milk in the fridge, and some breast milk was given to a baby, and it turned out that it wasn't from their mum, it was from a different mum. Okay, Tessa, what do you think about this? This is just your kind of example.

Well, when we talked last week about a mistake, we were saying that you didn't want it to be something terrible. But duty of candor is actually different because in duty of candor, ideally, it won't be your mistake. Because what you want is to have an example where it happened and you were the person who was there when the mistake came to light, and therefore your job is to do the duty of candor part. And given that it wasn't your mistake, it's actually fine if it was serious. And in some ways, it's better if it's more serious because then you're your skills of duty of candor are more experienced because telling someone that your baby's been given the wrong breast milk is quite a big deal versus telling them that you mislabeled a blood sample or something, which is less of a big deal. It's still duty of candor, but it's not as significant. And so, your skills in breaking difficult news and dealing with that, you won't be able to demonstrate them as well as you could in this example. So, I think it's a really nice example. And it's quite simple to explain, so you don't have to spend too long. Like, you could— a couple of sentences, we all know what happened. So, yeah, I think good example. What do you think?

Yeah, I like it. I like it a lot. And I think, yeah, as you say, we don't want people to spend ages on the explanation or describing what the incident is for any of these examples. Because what we want them to focus on is what they did. So we want them to be able to, to focus on the steps that they took to address this. So in this particular example, what you need to focus on is that you understand the duty of candour process. So you can describe the steps that you took under duty of candour, and particularly the apology around the mistake that you delivered to the family. And so part of your reflection is going to be on, you know, what you learnt about what families need to hear in those moments when we apologise that we've caused either them or their loved one harm.

Mm-hmm.

And in addition to that, you need to be able to walk the panel through the Duty of Candle process. So, you know, I went to apologise to the family. I explained what had happened, and I explained that there would be an investigation around this to learn from this and to make sure that this doesn't happen to another family. And then you'll talk about the, the day text and the escalation, the investigation of that error. And then you'll talk about how you um, generated some departmental learning as a result of that, and then how you fed that into your organisational learning strategy, um, and also how you fed that learning back to the family. And that is closing the loop on that duty of candour process, but it all stems from an incident that's really easy for the panel to understand because you haven't spent 5 minutes describing this, that, and the other thing that happened.

Yeah. And when it's your— if it was your mistake, you wouldn't really be able to do that in a couple of sentences. You wouldn't be able to explain it because you'd really feel the need to explain why it happened. You know, it wasn't really— it was very busy, and, you know, there was 2 things next to each other in the fridge, and someone told me it was fine, and it was, you know, it was a Friday night, and 5— and you feel the need to explain why you made the mistake. And that's just only human. That's only human. But actually, when it's not your mistake, you don't have to get into that. You just say, it came to light when I was in charge of the shift or whatever that this error had happened. It was my job to do duty of candor. One thing that I commonly see people leave out when they practice this question is the how did you feel thing. So how did you feel, and how did the family respond? Because we get into the steps of, I've apologized, and I've told them, and I've said I'll do this, and I rectify this, and here's the PALS leaflet, et cetera. You can say, it was my job to do duty of candor, and actually, I knew this family well, and so I had a good relationship with them. So although I felt a bit apprehensive about doing it, because obviously I was telling them something that was a big deal, I actually knew that I could deliver it in a way that was sensitive. Or you say, I was quite stressed about doing this because I know this family had had other issues with the care they'd been receiving, and this was just going to add fuel to the fire. So I was nervous about it, but I've had experience doing it before, and I knew it— I knew how to handle it. So, a short thing like that, I think, can really help the panel understand you better. And it's part of that connection, isn't it? It's like how you go from just being someone who knows the steps of duty of candor to a human who's going to be a member of their team.

Yeah.

And the same on the other side, you telling the family you've given the wrong breast milk to their baby. So, then what happens? What did they say? Did they say, this is outrageous, this hospital's terrible, I'm taking my baby and I'm going? Or did they say, That's obviously not ideal. Really appreciate you telling me, you know, and what can we do to rectify it or whatever? So, that part helps show how you are with families as well, rather than just moving on to, I told them, and then I reported, then I did the DATIX. And so, I think these two are good things to practise when you're practising the answer to make sure you fit them in.

Yeah. Look, I think the bottom line is, We want to show the panel that you are the person that they want on their team.

Yeah.

I'm going to be somebody that can consistently deliver high-quality care for our patients and families, and I'm a great colleague. So you need to be able to demonstrate that you are a nice, warm, compassionate human throughout this interview, as well as somebody who knows the system and the process for dealing with Whatever you deal with day to day.

And duty— this duty of candor example is actually a great way to be able to bring in both of these things. It can be harder in other questions to bring in both, but this is a great one where you can. Great. Okay, so good example. We like that example. So next, we're going to look at an interview question that you might get and how to approach it. So what's the— what question are we looking at this week?

So today, we are looking at, how does PSRF improve patient safety? Okay, so this is quite topical, right? PSRF is a new thing. Interview panels are testing out whether people actually know what it means.

Yes. So the thing you don't want to happen is that you then say, sorry, what is PSRF? Which is really what you want to avoid. So now you've listened to this, you need to make sure you know about PSRF. There are people in training who will not know about it because they haven't had experience of it. You have to know about this for your consultant interview because this is another example of a question that if they ask you this and you have zero clue what PSIRF is, you're going to feel embarrassed, you're going to look unprepared, and yeah, it's going to make it more stressful than it needs to be. So be duly warned. So PSIRF, Patient Safety Incident Response Framework. Is a new way of looking at how we deal with incidents compared to the previous way where you risk-grade stuff, severe risk, moderate risk, minor, and then the level of investigation will depend on how significant the risk was. That's the system the way before. But with PSRF, what we're doing is trying to make a more common sense approach because actually there'll be some severe risk incidents where we actually know what the learning is. And we have systems in place to address this. But there also might be minor risk incidents that actually there's loads of learning from. And so in the risk grading system before, the minor incidents didn't really need any investigation because nothing happened. But actually, there's opportunity there that we were missing. And so PSRF is a more common sense tailored approach where you can look at each incident separately and decide whether you think it should be addressed and in what way. And that is the premise of PSRF. PSURF. So I think we probably won't do a deeper dive into that now, but I think it's good to know the essentials of it and think about what you know about the different ways that incidents can be dealt with and the principles of why we're dealing with them in that way.

And specifically, we want you to be able to focus on maintaining patient safety With a very— with a focus on learning. So we've removed that focus on blame that we had in the previous system. So whenever you frame your answer on PSRF, we want you to really reference the fact that you are all about the learning and maintaining safe and effective systems. for our patients? How would you walk through this question?

Well, I would look at themes of why PSRF was brought in in the first place. So I would look at the thing I mentioned about common sense approach to looking— so some minor instance might have serious learning as well. I think the timeframe is better than in the previous system because one of the issues before is that A lot of people had left by the time anything went through an SI process. Half of the team had moved on to other places. And then as a trainee, you would be contacted about something from 6 months ago in a place you're no longer working, and it's all a bit of a distant memory. And so, the learning, there's a question about the utility of the learning from that. And so, this should be, you can choose shorter, more focused ways of investigating stuff. And so, I think that definitely means you're more responsive. It's more timely. And so, that improves patient safety as well. And I guess the other thing is just embedding that no-blame approach. It's very focused on systems, not you and what you did, but actually about how to improve the system. So, I think these are probably the key things.

So, if you were answering a question about PSARF, you might take the duty of candour example that we just used. So, you could talk about that incident where the breast milk was mixed up. And you could talk about how you as a team had investigated that and how you'd tried to understand what the systems and processes were around the way that you store and subsequently deliver breast milk in a way that reduces the risk or completely mitigates the risk of mixing it up another time. And again, that will be a real focus on not Well, who got the breast milk out of the fridge and gave it to the wrong baby? It's much more about what is the system for how we store and deliver breast milk to neonates so that we can actually make sure that that is safer in the future.

Yeah, agree. So the bottom line is you definitely need to know about PSRF. So make sure you have a read about it because it comes up pretty commonly and it's an easy one that you could be stumped by if you If you haven't heard of it, so make sure you have a look. Okay, and then last up, we've got our tip and trick of the week, and this week we're looking at why you need to be clear on why you want this job in particular.

Yeah, this really matters, doesn't it? The panel need to know that you are applying for this job because this is the job of your dreams. It's the one that you really want. Now, we're under no illusion, we do have people coming through the Academy who say to us, I've been for 5 interviews before I joined the Academy and I didn't get any of them, I just basically need a job. That's not what the panel want to hear, very obviously. So this is about really understanding some specifics around this job and showing the panel that you really care about this, that you've got some passion For this particular job so that you can build a connection with them as you move through your interview.

Yeah, and I think you need to dig deep because in the end you could say, well, I don't— I'm, you know, this isn't my dream job. And of course, not everyone is applying for their dream job, but you have to find a way to want the job and convey that to the panel. So, you really need to think like, why are you applying and what can you say? What, you know, what— it's not just conveying it to the panel out loud, but it's actually knowing it yourself. Because it'll come, it just comes, it's so obvious if you go into an interview and you don't want the job, the panel are gonna smell it a mile off. And then they're just, it's very hard for them to want to give someone a job who isn't that bothered. Everyone wants to be wanted and they are no different. They want to be loved. They want you to want to be there. So, I would really think beforehand and be clear in your mind why you want this job and also clear in your mind that you do want this job and persuade yourself, even if it's only, Temporary, persuade yourself, this is a great opportunity for me. I'm going in and I really want to get this job. Otherwise, I think you're doing yourself a disservice and them, and it's going to be very clear in the interview.

Yeah. And I think, you know, think about things like, what is it about their team that really appeals to you? What is it about the work that they do in their department that's particularly engaging for you? Do you really like working with a particularly diverse patient group? And they've got that in their trust. Are you really enjoying some particular type of service delivery that they're focusing on at the moment? Do you admire them for their particular outcomes or whatever? So just think about what it is that connects you to this job. And be ready to talk about it in your interview.

Great. Okay, so we will wrap up there, and next week we're going to look at some more questions that come up. And in particular, we're going to look at a question about EDI, equality, diversity, and inclusion, which is coming up very commonly in interviews, and we will chat about that next week. So, see you there.

See you then.