Acute Internal Medicine 13th April 2024

Acute Internal Medicine ST4 Interview 2024

If you’re applying for Acute Internal Medicine ST4 in 2024, you’ll find everything you need to know here. Our Acute Internal Medicine ST4 interview guide includes the key recruitment dates, the interview format and how your performance will be scored.

Because of its varied and dynamic nature, Acute Internal Medicine ST4 is a competitive pathway. Last year’s competition ratios demonstrate this, as there were 335 applications for the 82 posts on offer. This gave a competition ratio of 4.09, meaning that more than four people applied for each position.

Acute Internal Medicine ST4 Application

The Acute Internal Medicine ST4 application window is open from 16 November –7 December 2023. The registration and application process takes around ten hours.

The application form requires you to fill out information based on your career, experience and personal achievements. Later in the process, you’ll have to provide evidence for the claims you make.

To be eligible for Acute Internal Medicine ST4, you must have evidence of having achieved Internal Medicine Stage 1 capabilities by one of the following methods:

• UK Internal Medicine Stage 1 Training
• UK ACCS (internal medicine)
• UK Broad-Based Training (medicine route)
• a standalone UK IMY3 programme (following completion of UK core medical training/ACCS (acute medicine)

There’s also the MRCP to consider. You must have either successfully completed the MRCP(UK) Part 1 at the time of application and MRCP(UK) Part 2 by the offer date or completed the Irish Basic Specialty Training in Medicine and the MRCPI full diploma by the offer date to be eligible to apply. Being eligible for the specialist register in general internal medicine by the time of application is another alternative which will allow you to apply for Acute Internal Medicine ST4.

You can find more information about the eligibility criteria in the 2024 person specification.

Acute Internal Medicine ST4 Application Score

For the 2024 Acute Internal Medicine application, there are 48 points available across 7 domains. Each domain will have various options, reflecting different levels of achievement. You will have to choose the response that best reflects your experience level for each of the following domains:

• Postgraduate Degrees and Qualification
• Additional Achievements
• Presentations
• Publications
• Teaching
• Quality Improvement
• Leadership and Management

Boost your Acute Internal Medicine ST4 application score by Training in Teaching

There are two separate scoring areas for teaching. There’s ‘teaching experience’, which requires you to have spent time teaching medical students or healthcare professionals.

You can also score points by ‘training in teaching.’ Scoring 2 points or higher requires a higher teaching qualification. However, all you have to do for 1 point is attend a teaching course like the Medibuddy Teach the Teacher Course.

Teach the Teacher Course by Medibuddy

This two-day CPD-accredited online course will earn you 12 CPD points on completion. It’s entirely flexible, so you can complete it in two days or multiple sessions over a longer period. On completion of the course, you’ll receive a certificate for your portfolio that is accredited for CCT, interviews and appraisals.

Find out more

Acute Internal Medicine ST4 Key Dates

The Acute Internal Medicine ST4 recruitment process takes place twice a year, with the interviews for round 1 of 2024 taking place in April. You can find more key dates for the upcoming recruitment round in the table below:

Acute Internal Medicine ST4 Interview Format

The Acute Internal Medicine ST4 interview is split across two stations. There are four questions in total, each lasting seven to eight minutes. So, when you consider the time between stations, you can expect the interview to last around 40 minutes.

Station 1 – Question 1 – Clinical Scenario

You’ll be given a clinical scenario for the first question, describing a hypothetical situation that you’re involved in. The brief will only be a few sentences long, and you’ll have a short amount of preparation time to get ready to answer questions on the scenario.

During this time, you should consider the following points:

• Your next steps
• The potential treatments
• Any further information you would gather
• How you would communicate with patients, family members and colleagues in the scenario
• Any factors you deem appropriate based on your past experiences

Station 1 – Question 2 – Medical Registrar Suitability

This part of the interview will go over the non-clinical aspects of being a medical registrar, with a focus on two of the Capabilities in Practice (CiPs) from the Internal Medicine Stage 1 Curriculum. These are:

• Managing an acute unselected take
  Managing a multi-disciplinary team, including effective discharge planning
• The questioning within this part of the interview will require you to think about your experience managing a team caring for acute medical admissions. To provide further weight to your answers, it’s important to provide specific examples that highlight this experience.

Station 1 – Question 3 – Communication Mark

This part of the interview isn’t strictly a question. But, the interviewers will judge you based on the communication skills you display throughout the station. This includes how you would communicate with the other people in the clinical scenario, as well as how you interact with the interviewers.

Station 2 – Question 1 – Suitability and Commitment

The second part of the interview starts by focusing on your suitability and commitment to the Acute Internal Medicine specialty. This is your opportunity to build on the information you provided in your application form.

Station 2 – Question 2 – Professionalism and Governance

The final stage of the interview assesses your understanding of professionalism and governance in a given situation. You won’t receive the question ahead of time here. Instead, the interviewers will start the discussion by asking a question verbally.

Acute Internal Medicine ST4 Interview Scoring

Each assessor will score you based on how you perform against the expected level, giving you a score between 1-5 for each section of the assessment. You can find the in-depth scoring framework below:

Later, your 10 scores will be combined to provide you with a raw interview score (RIS), which will fall somewhere between 10 and 50. But, before your application can be considered ‘appointable’ and become eligible to receive offers, your results must meet the following criteria:

• None of your interview scores can be a 1/5
• A maximum of two of your interview scores can be a 2/5
• A RIS higher than 30

Total Score

After the interview, a weighting is applied to each of the scores, giving you a total score. Your application score is included in this, although it only accounts for 20 marks. The bulk of your total score will come from your interview, where there are 80 marks up for grabs.

When you break the interview down even further, you’ll find the clinical scenario and suitability and commitment sections are worth more than the others. Because of this, it’s worth spending more time preparing for these sections.

Good luck with your application!