Interview Tools

DPN offers an easy-to-use way to assess prospective students’ attributes and values.

Candidates are loaded onto DPN and anonymised. Each candidate can experiment with practice issues at any time before their interview.

On the day of the interview two unseen situations are added. For example:

SHOULD I PRESCRIBE?

You are an Independent Prescribing Pharmacist working in a GP practice. You specialise in the treatment of heart failure. A new drug has recently come to market which has significant benefits for certain patients with heart failure. It has been shown to reduce the number of hospital admissions by 50%. It is very expensive in comparison to the existing therapies, costing £800 per patient per month.

Two of your patients have been recommended the new treatment by the hospital consultant cardiologist. Based on your clinical review of two patients, you agree and prescribe this new medicine for them.

The Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) contacts your GP practice and tells you not to prescribe the treatment as they consider it to be a specialist hospital drug, and that the knowledge needed to prescribe the treatment is lacking in primary care.

It is proposed that you should refer the patients back to the hospital.

Do you agree with the proposal?

Scenario created by Mr Mike Pettit, Sussex University

Students have a limited time to respond to the situations on interview day.

After responding, candidates take a printout of their thoughts into the interview. This forms the core of their assessment. Typically, they are asked to expand on their views and justifications and consider alternatives.

You can try out practice interview cases at the foot of this page. You will have access to the full reports as soon as you respond. Simply register and login - or login if you are already a member - and respond to one or more issues below.

All data are stored confidentially, ensuring fairness and consistency, and enabling constructive feedback.

The data can be readily analysed for a wide range of variables, providing a growing knowledge base to assist future recruitment.