Author: Maddie Wigmore-Sykes

Read time: 6 minutes

In this post, Maddie Wigmore-Sykes, a final-year medical student, breaks down the stages of the UK Foundation Programme (UKFP) application process.

Applying for my first job as a doctor filled me with equal parts excitement and dread. Navigating the UKFP website, working out where all the tabs were on Oriel and keeping up with the many deadlines can get a bit overwhelming. Never fear though, as here is our realistic (and slightly lengthy) guide to the UK Foundation Programme. Keep reading for further details on how to get each section done – dates provided are for 2022 starters!

For those of you who, like me, didn’t have a clue how any of this works, here’s a brief overview of the application process:

• • All foundation programme jobs in the UK are applied to via an online platform called Oriel
  • Your university nominates you at the start of your final year as eligible to apply for the programme and Oriel will contact you to create an account and fill in your relevant details for your foundation programme application
  • You can also choose to apply for an academic foundation programme (AFP) or a foundation priority programme (FPP) at this point (further blog posts on these incoming…)
  • In order to somehow stratify thousands of applicants, the UKFP uses the Situational Judgement Test (SJT), an ethics exam designed to “test the attributes needed to work as a foundation doctor”. Your SJT score gets combined with points you’ve accumulated from your decile and any additional academic qualifications for a grand score out of 100 (the good news is that you get 34 points for the medical degree – phew!)
  • As part of the application, you must rank where in the country you want to go for your first job
  • Oriel then matches you to an area based on your preferred locations, highest scorers first, and once you know where you’re going, you can rank the individual jobs – easy, right?

National Application Window (8th – 22nd September 2021)

It’s really important you don’t miss the deadline for national applications. This is where you will fill in all your details onto your Oriel account, including any additional qualifications or publications that may get you some extra points for 2022 entry (apologies to our 2023 starters who will be affected by UKFPO’s new guidance). Make sure to find your degree certificate early – you need to prove you have that iBSc!

The team at Oriel will then verify your additional educational achievements and provide you with an educational performance measure (EPM) score out of 50. For further information on how this works, check out the UKFP FAQs here.

SJT Booking Window (4th – 7th October 2021)

Another date to add to your diary is the deadline for SJT booking. You do this via the Pearson Vue website and can choose to sit the exam at a local Pearson Vue centre or at home with an online invigilator. You will be able to sit the SJT between 7th – 19th December 2021 and 18th – 23rd January 2022. 

Preparing for the SJT is difficult, it’s designed to be hard to revise for. There are official practice papers here, which give you an idea of the style and content the exam covers, which is mainly the contents of the GMC’s Good Medical Practice. Private SJT courses are advertised in the run-up to the exam, but these are by no means necessary to get a good score. Your SJT score gets scaled across the rest of the country into a mark out of 50 so is worth the same as your EPM score.

A further blog post on preparing for the SJT is in the works – watch this space!

Location Preferencing (deadline TBA – last year’s deadline 18th February 2021)

As part of the application process, you will have to pick your location preferences for where you want to work. For this, the UK is split into 20 different foundation schools, some as large as Wales and Scotland, while London and the surrounding area is split into three different schools. Deciding where you might like to start your career is really exciting; you might want to stay in the place you studied, move closer to home or try somewhere completely new.

Unfortunately some foundation schools are more competitive than others, so it’s worth ranking all the options just in case. The schools do release cut-off scores from previous years, but they tend to fluctuate so take them with a pinch of salt.

You have a lot of time to think about this, so don’t panic.

National Allocation (10th March 2022)

This is the day where you will find out where you’ll be working and Oriel will inevitably crash just as you’re about to log in. You’ll also get your SJT score so you’ll have more of an idea of how you’re ranked. It isn’t always good news for everyone, but there are excellent hospitals in all areas of the country and a lot of really good jobs!

The application process now changes slightly depending on which foundation school you have been allocated to. In the smaller areas with only a few hundred jobs to rank, you go directly into the programme preferencing stage, where you rank as many jobs as you want based on location and specialty. This requires either a complicated spreadsheet or a lot of flashcards. Bigger schools, such as South Thames and North West England, have a group matching stage first where you pick individual regions or trusts first. Once you’ve been matched to the smaller group, you can then rank the jobs as above from a much more manageable pool. 

For one-stage preferencing, the deadline is 31st March 2022. For two-stage preferencing, the group preferencing deadline is 16th March 2022 and the programme preferencing deadline is 31st March 2022.

Match to Programme Results (7th April 2022)

You’ll find out where you’ll be working and what specialties you’ll be doing and it will all suddenly feel very real! Most programmes have a really good mix of surgical, medical and community placements so whatever you end up with, you’ll get some great experience.

Good luck with your applications and let us know if you have any questions in the comments!

Read time: 4 minutes

In this post, Maddie Wigmore-Sykes, a final-year medical student, demystifies the NHS ePortfolio and explains the best ways to get yourself MiniCEXs and CbDs. 

Starting your clinical years of medical school is a time of excitement and new experiences, including your new companion: the NHS ePortfolio! Designed to help you gather feedback and reflect on your performance, the ePortfolio is something to get your head around and get used to – we’ll be filling out CbDs and MiniCEXs for a long time.

The bread and butter of the ePortfolio is the supervised learning event (SLE), a form you can send to doctors (FY2 and above!) who have witnessed you performing examinations or taking histories. They can then provide you with areas you did well on, and some areas to work on. At UCL, we’re expected to do four or five of these per term. SLEs are broken down further into CbDs and MiniCEXs, but what do they actually mean?

What is a CbD and how do I get one?

CbD stands for case-based discussion. The best way to get a CbD is to find a patient, take a history from them and then write up your findings. Try to think up a management plan based on the patient’s case and do some reading around their condition for bonus points. You can then present the patient to a doctor in the team who might ask you some questions about the case, such as what your differentials are and what you would do next if you were managing their care. 

Module tutors are well-placed to present CbDs to. If you set up a meeting with them every few weeks, you can present a new patient to them each time and get a few CbDs straight off the bat. You can also just ask a friendly doctor who you’ve met a few times if it would be okay to present a patient to them – they’ll almost always say yes!

Here’s an example of what to write in your CbD ticket to send to a doctor (not a real patient):

So how do I do a MiniCEX?

I’m not sure if anyone really knows what a MiniCEX stands for or what makes it mini, but please let me know if you do! Effectively they’re all about examinations and you’ll need a doctor to watch you perform one on a patient from start to finish. They might then ask you to present your findings, which is really good practise for OSCEs and future life. 

Bedside teaching is a perfect opportunity for getting a MiniCEX, so it’s worth brushing up on some examination skills beforehand and then being brave and volunteering to have a go! Twilight tutors are also keen to get patients with good clinical signs for you to examine as well. 

Here’s an example of what to write in your MiniCEX ticket to send to a doctor (not a real patient):

Actually getting your SLEs signed off

To complete an SLE, you have to log onto your ePortfolio and send the doctor assessing you a ticket. You can do this by going onto Forms and then Ticket Requests. You’ll need to know the doctor’s email address to send them a ticket, so make sure you have that written down! Remember, the doctor has to be an FY2 or above to fill in your ticket. I’d also recommend uploading a photo of you to your ePortfolio profile – some doctors will get a lot of tickets and you want them to remember who you are.

Inevitably, some of your well-crafted tickets will not get filled in, so it’s worth doing a few more SLEs than you need to, just to make sure they all get done. The ePortfolio has an option to send reminders, so if it’s been a few weeks, don’t be afraid to send one. It might take a while for doctors to complete your ticket, so try to be organised and get your tickets sent out before the end of the module to prevent a mad dash to complete your ePortfolio! 

 

In summary

1. If you’re feeling nervous, do some SLEs with your module tutor. You can prepare in advance of the sessions and you’ll feel more comfortable with someone you know.
2. Volunteer in bedside teaching to do the history or examination, it’s a great opportunity to have a doctor watch you perform these skills.
3. When you’re in clinics or in the Emergency Department, you might be the first person a patient sees so you can elicit a history and examine someone without already knowing their diagnosis. This might be a bit trickier, but is definitely the most valuable way to do an SLE.

Read time: 4 minutes

In this post, Maddie Wigmore-Sykes, a final-year medical student, gives her take on how to get started at medical school and what to do if it all starts going a bit wrong. Expect some motivational content along the way.

Finding your groove

When I first arrived at medical school, excited and more than a little scared, I had no idea what to expect, nor what was expected of me. I remember sitting in a lecture theatre, completely unable to follow what was being said, surrounded by 300 other people who seemed to know exactly what they were doing. They probably weren’t any more enlightened than me and, even though there will always be that person who claims they’ve done the whole course by Christmas, most of us were just pretending we knew what to do.

It is clichéd, but true, that medicine is a marathon not a sprint. You do not need to turn up on your first day with an understanding of how to learn from lectures or knowing what an OCaPE (Objective Clinical and Practical Examination) is. Spend the first few weeks, or months, getting your bearings and experimenting with different learning styles to find one that works for you. Here are a few suggestions on how to take notes in lectures:

• • • Print and annotate on the slides
    • Review the lecture slides before the lecture, make a template for your notes  and add to them during the session – this requires some forward-planning
    • Type as you go (if you can keep up with the fast-talking lecturers!)
    • Rather than writing notes on the information given to you in the lecture, write questions to test yourself, along with short answers, or note down which page of the lecture slide shows the answer
    • Call me old-fashioned, but I found that handwriting notes helped me to stay focused during lectures

After lectures, try consolidating your learning with some fun (ish?) activities. Test yourself with flashcards or set up a revision group with your friends where you can quiz each other – make it a regular thing so you’re committed to going through your notes. 

There will be endless resources recommended to you by both fellow students and lecturers. It’s impossible to use them all, so it’s worth trying a few before you buy, and just because your friend has already completed *insert random question bank here*, doesn’t mean you have to as well. Stick to your learning outcomes for each lecture and find materials that complement those and you’ll be all set. For more information on some of our recommended resources, as well as how to improve your learning in our new online Covid-19 world, check out Vikram’s post: A Four Step Guide to Working from Home.

Losing your groove and getting it back again

Six years is a long time to be on your A-game and a lot of us will have a wobble or two at some point. I never quite found my footing in first year and ended up failing and having to resit the exams; as a previously high achiever at school, this felt confidence-shattering at the time – how could I possibly become a doctor if I couldn’t even get through year one? Clearly I was wrong, as I’m now set to graduate in 2021, but it took me a long time to get over it. 

With the competition inherent to medical schools and our own personal drives to succeed, it’s no wonder we feel this constant pressure to prove ourselves. We’re ranked from our very first formative and subsequently measure ourselves on how well we’re doing compared to a cohort of very academic people, losing sight of the fact that simply being a part of this cohort is an amazing achievement in itself. It’s natural to want to do as well as we can, but if you do ever feel disappointed in your performance, pick yourself up and remember that a ranking in a year group does not define who you are or how good a doctor you can be. 

It’s okay to feel overwhelmed sometimes, medical school is difficult! If you find yourself wobbling or just need a bit of support, look after yourself and remember that help is always available. Transition mentors and other older year students can be great sources of advice and we’re always happy to offer guidance where we can. Personal tutors and the medical school student support team can also not only help with practical solutions if you’re struggling with motivation and organisation, but also assist you with any health and welfare concerns. 

TLDR: Medical school is difficult, but if you stay calm, get help when you need it and remember you’re more than your latest exam result, you will be okay.