Situational Judgement

  • The situational Judgement section of the UCAT  consists of hypothetical scenarios based on a clinical setting or as a medical/dental student 

  • Each scenario has about six questions associated with it.

  • There are 7 main themes:

    • Confidentiality

    • Professionalism

    • Noncompliance

    • Distressed patients

    • Miscommunication

    • Coping with pressure

    • Teamwork

The UCAT’s Secret…

The SJT section of the UCAT is derived from the GMC’s good practice guidelines. This means the quicker you memorise and get used to it, the faster you will see an improvement to your SJT score! Click here to access the GMC good practice guidelines.

Question Types

Importance

Some questions come up time and time again. They have the same answers we well! These questions will always have the answers listed below:

  • If a staff member has a heavy workload but a patient expresses any type of concern - VERY IMPORTANT

  • Hospital / dental team reflected on a mistake that has been made - VERY IMPORTANT

  • If a patient feels inconvenienced and could potentially feel undervalued - VERY IMPORTANT

Appropiateness

For the importance and appropriateness question types you get partial marking if you choose an answer option close to the correct answer for example if the correct answer is a very appropriate thing to do but you put appropriate, but not ideal you still get some marks

Standarised answers:

  • If your friend feels squeamish before a dissection / teaching session, your priority is to calm them down

  • If a relative seems to be excessively speaking on behalf of a patient and you want to ask them to leave the room - VERY APPROPRIATE

  • Reporting dishonesty - APPROPRIATE, NOT IDEAL because you should let them own up first, but there would be no bad outcome so it is appropriate

  • Gathering opinions from everyone before making a decision for a team - APPROPRIATE, NOT IDEAL / VERY APPROPRIATE

Most Appropriate and Least Appropriate Response

Unlike the two previous subsections you don’t get any partial marking for this question type and you have to get both actions correct to get a mark.

Situational Judgement Tips

To get a better understanding of how a doctor/medical student should behave in certain situations and see what actions are appropriate read the GMC’s good medical practice. 

  • In any of the scenarios, patient safety is always of the utmost importance. 

  • Understand medical ethics, confidentiality, consent and capacity. 

  • Know your role and the limitations that come with some of them. For example if the passage states that you are a medical student you should know that a medical student can’t prescribe medication to a patient.

  • Seniority doesn’t matter in some situations for example just because someone is a consultant doesn’t mean they can break patient confidentiality and you can’t report them or they can bully junior doctors or medical students.

  • Don’t escalate too quickly. Try to solve the problem locally before escalating. For example, if a question states that you are a medical student doing a group project and one of your team members isn't cooperating try to solve the problem within your group before escalating to your lecturer. The same also applies to scenarios taking place in a hospital or dental practice. 

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