Birmingham Medicine: the interview

Format

Multiple mini interview (MMI) · 6 or 7 stations of 8 minutes; online for international applicants

When

For 2026 entry, invitations went out between December and January and interviews ran in January and February. Invitations continue until every interview place is filled; most rejections come only after that.

In detail

Home applicants: six or seven stations of eight minutes, each including two minutes to read a scenario, in person; you can start at any station. International applicants: online on Zoom, at least two stations including a role-play, plus a separate online calculation assessment on another date.

Who interviews

Academic and clinical staff, professional services staff and trained senior medical students; an observer may sit in but takes no part. Online, one interviewer or role-player leads and a second interviewer also scores you, independently.

Stations

• Critical thinking. A healthcare topic to work through, with no clinical knowledge needed: identify the issues and argue for a course of action.
• Commitment and insight into medicine. Your work or other experience, especially caring for or watching others care for vulnerable people, and what you learnt from it.
• Personal and ethical challenges. A scenario about challenges healthcare staff face, and how you would cope with them.
• Professionalism. Poor professional behaviour by a member of the team: how you would respond as a student, and why professionalism matters.
• Data interpretation and debate. Clinical information to interpret and draw conclusions from, and how you would explain it to a patient or carer.
• Role-play. A professional actor in a healthcare situation: building rapport and handling the challenges they raise.
• Calculation. A computer-based station: simple, GCSE-level calculations on clinical data, done in the right order.

How it is scored

Every station and the SJT are weighted the same. Birmingham is likely to set a minimum standard for each station except the calculation ones, well below the average: miss it at one or more and you may not get an offer, whatever your total.

From interview to offer

Offers are on interview performance and the SJT score only, not academic merit; academics are looked at again only to separate applicants on the same score. Decisions are not reviewed on request.

Read with the application

Not scored, but it is read: commitment to medicine must be evident in it.

It counts at or after the interview. No band is rejected, and the band plays no part in shortlisting. After the interview it is scored like one more MMI station, weighted the same as the others: Band 1 earns full marks, Band 2 two thirds, Band 3 one third and Band 4 nothing.

1. 01 · Motivation

   Why medicine, rather than nursing, pharmacy or becoming a physician associate?

2. 02 · Ethics

   A 15-year-old asks a GP for contraception and does not want her parents told. What should the GP weigh up?

3. 03 · Role play

   You borrowed a friend's laptop and it has stopped working. The actor is your friend: tell them.

4. 04 · Data

   This table shows A&E waiting times at two hospitals over a year. What can and can't you conclude from it?

5. 05 · Teamwork

   Tell us about a time a group you were part of was not working well. What did you do, and what would you change?

6. 06 · Work experience

   What did you see on your work experience that surprised you about a doctor's job?

7. 07 · The NHS

   What is one pressure on the NHS at the moment, and what would you do about it?