Hello.
If you're preparing for an interview with the College for the specialist
pathway, then you're probably wondering what sort of questions are you going
to get asked about you as a consultant, as a specialist in your own field?
Well,
if you followed any of my videos,
you'll know that the interview for the specialist pathway usually takes
on a certain nature, regardless of every College.
Usually the first half of the interview is
about questions about your training program and how closely that aligns
with the curriculum for the relevant program here in Australia.
So the easiest thing to do there is
to compare what you did with the curriculum,
and that will help you understand what sort of questions you might get in gaps.
But then the second half of the interview is usually about feeling you out,
getting a feel for you as a specialist, a consultant,
whether you'll fit in to Australia, whether you are doing similar things
to what consultants here in Australia do in your own field.
Of course, again, if you follow some of my videos,
you'll know that I do point out that on pretty much every College website,
there's kind of a high level framework that kind of describes the types
of behaviors and capabilities and skills and competencies that the College expects
in its own Fellows here in Australia, so that if you're applying
to that College, then you're expected to be at a similar
level, because once you become a Fellow of the College, they want you to maintain
that sort of capability and professionalism.
So here's the College of Physicians
professional framework, practice framework, communication quality
and safety, teaching and learning, a little bit of sort of extra detail about
what each means research, cultural competence, et cetera.
And we know the racks.
The College of Surgeons has 1,2,3,4,5, 6,7, 8,9, 10 competencies now the most recent
edition being Cultural Competence and Cultural Safety.
And, of course, pretty much every College has a professional framework.
They kind of use it to establish what those fellows can do within what's called
the scope of practice, how they should be maintaining the standards.
And it's also looked at in terms of your continuing professional development,
and they're all pretty much based, but maybe one or two on the Canadian
candidate framework, which I've done a few videos about.
And I think it's a fantastic framework.
In fact, some of the colleges, like psychiatry, radiology, et cetera,
have just literally adopted this framework.
That makes a lot of sense.
So this is a seven dimensional framework
with, again, some pretty high level concepts here.
So that's all great and well and good.
And yes, you should be kind of thinking
about how do you demonstrate medical expertise in your current consultant role?
How do you demonstrate high level with quality communication, leadership, etc.
For but it doesn't kind of give you the level of detail you want.
Something else that might help you
in anticipating the questions you might get about you as a consultant
in the specialist pathway interview assessment is to go and look
at the training handbooks of the training curriculums for the various specialists.
So for example, in general and acute care
medicine with the College physicians, we have a few kind of key things here's.
Your curriculum which you need to look at and your professional qualities
curriculum which is for all fellows, that's worth looking at as well.
But if we go to the general and acute care
medicine training curriculum and you'll see this pretty much for every College
of physician advanced training program, we skip down past the Acknowledgments,
introduction, et cetera, and these curriculums and handbooks
usually go for about somewhere between 50 to 80 pages.
But we start to get some information here,
the definition of what a general position is, their attributes here as well.
And so this section here and kind of down to here is kind of a really good section
to go through and sort of think, well, do I demonstrate this in my specialist work?
Because these are basically the outcomes
that they're intending for the local training.
So this is what a fellow should look like coming out of training.
So therefore you want to be able
to demonstrate you're as close to that as possible.
So am I an expert diagnostician? How do I
demonstrate that in my work? What examples can I give? Do I provide integrated care?
Do I do a lot of collaborating and networking and bringing other team
members involved to optimize care for my patients?
I solve problems?
Am I a good patient advocate?
So go through those sections, look at anything that's entitled
an outcome or expected competencies of completion of training and make sure
that you can cover that in terms of a how you've been trained would be how you're
continuing to professionally develop and demonstrate those roles and competency
in your specialist practice where you are at the moment.
Another example,
College of Pathology in their general pathology training handbook.
This one is actually set out even better.
Here are the aims of the training program.
Again, what they're aiming to develop is even a list of learning outcomes
and training activities that you can go through.
And you'll see that for all the other curriculum.
I think Hematology I noticed was really well set out like in one page.
I think it was.
So it will depend even within the colleges generally the training program.
So this is what you as a hematology specialist should be able to demonstrate
to the College if you're applying for hematology.
Okay, so you can see how you can even generate some questions around that.
Think about if they're going to give me
some clinical vignettes on things, what they might be on.
Am I getting some curly questions?
Well, they've even listed some particular
techniques here that you might get some curly questions on.
So that was sort of help and guide you.
Radiology also has some learning outcomes.
I've actually got actual learning outcomes ambulance which may be starting to get
a little bit unwieldy because there's like a lot on the intrinsic role
establishing a poor communicating communicating with colleagues.
So it's probably maybe a little bit too
much but at least it gives you a bit of a guide in terms of what they're
looking to see you demonstrate, maybe some examples you need to accumulate
from that and then finally if you look at surgery surgery can be a bit hard.
Not all, but a few of the set training
programs curriculum is a paywall so they're hard to get access to.
But again neurosurgery I've got a nice little statement of competence that goes
with two pages and this is the overall objective of the set training program
neurosurgery is to produce competent, independent specialist.
With neurosurgeons
this is what they expect you local trainees and therefore you if you're
wanting to apply to be a neurosurgeon in Australia which is quite difficult
because there's only a limited spots but anyway there's a list of things
that topical areas that you're most likely grilled about in terms of the consultant
section of your specialist pathway interview.
So hopefully that helps you and understand what you might get questions around
in the College assessment interview for the specialist pathway.
Of course, I've got a free course that covers a whole lot of other issues
around the special pathway and some services to help you on my website.
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this and I look forward to seeing you in another video, bye for now, bye
you.