Maximise your performance at the 2026 Core Surgical Interview

Core Surgical Training (CST) remains one of the most competitive entry points into surgical training, with over 5,300 applicants for 630 posts in 2025.

For the 2026 recruitment cycle, the CST interview remains the dominant component of the final score, contributing 90%, with the MSRA making up the remaining 10%. That means your performance on the day plays a huge role in determining whether you secure a place, and more importantly, whether you land a post in your preferred region.

Once you clear the MSRA hurdle, the interview is where candidates are truly separated. Treat it like a high-stakes exam, where the margin between receiving an offer and missing out can come down to how well you’ve rehearsed the types of scenarios and questions you’ll be asked.

So how do I prepare for my interview?

Effective preparation focuses on two areas: Knowledge and Delivery.

The Core Surgical interview is knowledge-intensive. If you don’t have the knowledge, it doesn’t matter how slick your delivery is, you won’t get the marks.

Equally, you might have consultant level knowledge, but if you don’t deliver it well, all those hours preparing will be for nothing!

This is your opportunity to demonstrate why you would make a good trainee.

This is where we come in…

The Medibuddy Online 2026 Core Surgical Interview Question Bank

If you’ve spoken to current CST trainees about how they prepared for their interview, you’ve probably already heard about our question bank. We are proud to have developed over 40 carefully crafted scenarios that mirror the interview. We’ve been doing this for a while now and know how important it is for the question bank to be up-to-date. Each year, our high-scoring editors make changes to the question bank to ensure it reflects the most recent interviews. Our team has secured some of the most competitive core surgical jobs in previous rounds, and we want to help you do the same!

Best of all, we’ve presented it in an easy to understand format, on a platform that you can access anywhere.

What will I learn from the Core Surgical Online Interview Question Bank?

The 2026 interview combines management and clinical into a single station alongside a portfolio station. Our question bank reflects this updated format, but we’ve kept management and clinical questions grouped separately so you can practise each style of scenario in isolation.

Why have we done this?

When we were preparing for our specialty interviews, getting accurate and helpful advice felt near impossible. The recruitment websites only provide you with so much information, and whilst asking those who have done the interview is useful, sometimes all it did was make us more nervous, instead of actually helping us to prepare.

Since then, we have been filtering through all the good and bad resources, so you don’t have to, and our high-scoring surgical trainees, have put it all together in one place, the Medibuddy Online Core Surgical Training Interview Question Bank.