Skills for Foundation Doctors
The skills below have been taken directly from
the criteria of the latest
person specifications on the MMC website. Please note that each
specialty has its own person specification (see our article on
making sense of person specifications) and you must refer
directly to these. This guide is intended to supplement these
documents with further ideas of how to achieve these skills.
It is wise to be aware of these criteria early
on in your F1 year – the person specifications are updated
annually.
Below are some pointers to help you develop
your skills base:
- Person specifications are commonly divided into essential and
desirable columns. Using this information, think about how you can
make yourself more desirable although you must be realistic: it may
not be possible to meet every aspect in the desirable
criteria.
- Think about how you can demonstrate your skills during the
recruitment process. Remember in an application, CV, or interview,
it is always good to have a few examples that you can talk about,
so you don’t keep repeating the same experience. Use cases from
your working experience in the hospital or the community to
demonstrate relevant skills.
- Keeping your e-Portfolio up-to-date will make it easier to
reflect on your learning as you complete your application. To help
you with this, you can read our article on
preparing your portfolio.
- Above all, employers value self-awareness and self-confidence.
Self-awareness is knowing your own strength and weaknesses. This is
why a good understanding of your own skills is so important, as
well as your ability to describe them.
Below are common skills identified in person specifications. We
have highlighted examples of how you could show you have the
desired skills. You will find that taking part in one activity,
such as teaching students or taking up an audit, can be used to
help develop several different and invaluable skills.
NHS Medical Careers would like to thank doctors Vivak
Hansrani, Nilima Shah and Ying Teo for reviewing this article and
for their suggestions.
Communication Skills
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Social confidence
- Talking about yourself in a way that shows self-awareness.
- Making people feel welcome
- Building relationships
- Empathising
- Valuing others/thanking others
- Negotiation skills
- Liaison skills
- Influencing skills
- Listening skills and giving appropriate feedback
- Articulating ideas
- Written communication – examples of emails, letters you have
written (your accuracy and attention to detail)
- Language skills
|
- Communication with colleagues, nurses, other professionals
- Communication with patients
- In meetings and discussions
- Presentations (international, national or regional)
- Volunteering
- Teaching medical students or F1 doctors
- Report writing/letter writing etc.
- Breaking bad news
- Taking histories
- Explaining about diagnoses
|
Management and leadership skills
(person specifications often refer to this as
‘managing others and team involvement’)
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
|
- Where you have motivated people
- Where you have delegated responsibility
- Actively sharing information and pooling skills
- Treating colleagues and patients with respect (being a good
role model to others)
- Supporting colleagues under pressure
- Directing people
- Decision-making
- Planning and targets
- Driving change
- Evaluating
|
- In meetings and discussions e.g. have you led a
multi-disciplinary meeting?
- When you have worked with a team to deliver an end result
- Can you ask to lead a ward round? Try to get written feedback
on this for your portfolio.
- Taking a position of responsibility on a committee
- In team projects e.g. audits
- Participation in a regional teaching day
- Suggesting and implementing changes
- Contributions you have made to reports, strategy and policy
documents
- Participation in the delivery of team presentations
- Any formal management courses you have attended
- Volunteering e.g. Foundation Rep
- Team sports/ outdoor pursuits e.g. Captaining a sports
team
- Previous job
|
Team involvement
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
|
- Where you have motivated people
- The variety of team-working situations you have
experienced
- Flexibility in team-working
- Working together to achieve shared goals
- Actively sharing information and pooling skills
- Treating colleagues and patients with respect
- Supporting colleagues under pressure
|
- When you have worked in a team to deliver an end result
- Taking a position of responsibility on a committee
- In team projects e.g. audits
- In meetings and discussions
- Suggesting and implementing changes
- Participation in the delivery of team presentations
- Volunteering
- Team sports
- Mentoring other students or juniors
|
Organisation and planning
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Setting targets and monitoring progress
- Working without direct supervision
- Combining your job with study, or family commitments
- Managing and prioritizing your personal workload
- Working in a pressurized environment
- Multi-tasking
|
- Project work e.g. setting realistic objectives, setting
milestones which you need to achieve by a certain date, monitoring
/ reviewing / recording it regularly, allowing for slippage and
difficulties, etc.
- Organising social / sporting / charity events
- In juggling work and study
- How you manage multi-tasking, multiple projects e.g.
prioritising, dividing up into bite sized chunks
- Grant or bursary applications
- Organising a taster session
- Involvement in sports
- Volunteering
- A gap year
|
Empathy and sensitivity
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Re-active, active listening
- Eliciting feedback
- Handling complaints
- Diffusing difficult situations
- Tact and diplomacy
- Taking in other’s perspectives
- Seeing patients as people
|
- Your doctor-patient relationships
- From working with colleagues
- Teaching or mentoring medical students
- Voluntary work
- Any consultation you have done where you were empathetic
towards a patient
|
Teaching
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Ability to explain topic clearly
- Ability to foster effective learning environment
- understanding your audience’s needs, variety of activities,
altering programme as you go along if needed
- Feedback from teaching
|
- listening to feedback and adjusting teaching for next
time
- where you have had input into developing a curriculum (e.g. for
medical students)
- teaching skills course
- Participation in a regional teaching day
|
Coping with pressure
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Prioritising cases when busy
- Having to think on your feet when no senior immediately to
hand
|
- Working in an environment with difficult patients or staff
- Acute on-call situations
- Presentations you have given
- Any busy environment
|
Vigilance and situational awareness
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Capacity to be alert to dangers or problems particularly
relating to clinical governance
- Awareness of developing situations
|
- Audit
- Working in an environment with difficult patients or staff
|
Problem solving
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Finding creative solutions to work problems
- Showing strong analytical skills
- Developing a system/ new way of working to improve
efficiency
- Overcoming obstacles to achieve an ambition
- Being results driven
|
- Working in an environment with difficult patients or staff
- Examples of where you have had to make tough decisions, where
you have weighed up the odds.
- In a research project or audit
- Where you have used your diagnostic and management skills
|
Decision making
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Making clinical decisions
- Using your own judgement effectively
- Logical approach to making decision
- Getting the balance right between making a decision quickly and
effectively looking at all the evidence
|
- Your day to day clinical work
- Audit
- Presentations
- Research
- You career decision-making
- Teaching or mentoring medical students (or F1s)
|
Research and audit skills
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Showing strong analytical skills
- Knowledge of how to approach researching a topic
- Good use of the internet for research
- Reviewing the peer-reviewed literature on a topic
- Report writing
- Knowledge of how to approach researching a topic
- Completion of literature searches
- Being able to sort out all the information you have
collected
|
- Audit projects
- Degrees – MSc, Bsc, Mres, Mphil, Phd, MD
- Publishing and presenting work
- Presentations
- Planning research projects
- Data interpretation/analysis
- Critical appraisal of articles for journal club
|
Professional integrity
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Taking responsibility for own actions
- Non-judgemental approach to others
- Display honesty and integrity
- Awareness of confidentiality and ethical issues
|
- Your doctor-patient relationships
- From working with colleagues
- Teaching or mentoring medical students
- Audit/clinical governance issues
- Any situation you have been in where you have had an ethical
dilemma
- Feedback from your seniors
|
Learning and personal
development
|
What you can demonstrate:
|
Examples of where you can get the
experience:
|
- Demonstrating an interest in furthering your personal
development
- Demonstrating self-awareness and self-reflective
practice
- By providing evidence of attending teaching and learning
programmes
- Able to accept feedback and constructive criticism
- By showing motivation to learn and continually update
skills
|
- Carrying out an audit
- Getting relevant project work
- By
undertaking short courses e.g. those run by one of the Royal
Colleges
- By being actively involved in your foundation year education
programme
- By organising a taster session
- Reflection in e-Portfolio
|