Only the August 2027 intake is listed. NHS England: "We may not be not accepting new applications for round 3 recruitment this year." Dates may change - check the official timeline before each deadline.
The interview has been entirely online for the past several years.
Who gets an interview: the MSRA is used to shortlist - "If your MSRA score is too low, you will be shortlisted out" - and "If you rank within the top 75 highest scoring applicants, then you will bypass the need for an interview", so the highest-ranked applicant who attends interview is ranked around 76th overall. The Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act 2026 applies to this recruitment, at the interview-offer and place-offer stages.
The interview, run by NHS England's National Obstetrics and Gynaecology Recruitment Office, lasts approximately 30 minutes and consists of 2 main parts.
An initial waiting room where you will be greeted, and your ID (passport) checked. You will also be asked to show your room and surroundings, so ensure you're in an appropriate place and make sure no secret consultant is hiding somewhere in your room.
The proper interview where you will be asked questions in two stations. Station 1 combines a clinical prioritisation question (6 minutes, after 5 minutes' reading time) with a 4-minute ethical and governance question; Station 2 is the structured interview (10 minutes). Clinical prioritisation and the structured interview carry 40 marks each; ethics and governance carries 20.
Bonus Section
The third scored element is the ethics and governance question (20 marks), asked in Station 1 straight after the clinical prioritisation question. There is no longer a separate "Global Performance Score" - your communication is judged within each question.
Interview Time Division as per NHS England (subject to change)
| Stage | Time |
|---|
| Waiting room before interview | 5 minutes |
| Identification check | 1 minute |
| Clinical prioritisation reading time | 5 minutes |
| Clinical prioritisation question | 6 minutes |
| Ethical and governance question | 4 minutes |
| Structured interview questions | 10 minutes |
| General amount of time in interview | 25 - 30 minutes |
Station A. Clinical Prioritisation
These are questions that you would be expected to know as an F2 and don’t require in-depth speciality knowledge.
They test your ability to recognise and prioritise the unwell patients and also test you to see if you know how to allocate your resources (like your F1 or the nurse in the ward). They also test whether you know when to escalate and there might even be an ethical concern in one of the cases; essentially they want to see if you are a safe doctor.
You will be given a scenario where:
- You are the on-call SHO in a hospital
- You receive four different calls regarding patients with varying urgency including their observations
- You have a team - this may be an F1 and/or registrars of different specialities.
You are given 5 minutes to read this and prepare.
This is followed by 6 minutes to address the question.
In the 5 minutes, you have to prepare the order of prioritisation order- you can just read out the order as the number or alphabet in the initial question (for example: My priority order would be B, D, C, A) followed by a breakdown of management for each case.
NHS England now publishes only the 40-mark total for this station. In previous years the top-priority scenario carried the most marks, so give it the most time and detail.
Advice & Tips
- Tip #1: Always have a paper and pen set aside before the interview starts.
You are allowed to have this during your clinical prioritisation. After 5 minutes of reading time, the questions may not be visible during the question.
- Tip #2: In your prep time, write down your thoughts.
Try to get down the order of prioritisation, the diagnoses, the differentials if any, brief further investigations, brief further management, and escalation or team involvement (if any).
In your 6-minute discussion, you will most likely be met with silence on the interviewers' part other than the occasional encouragement or clarification, so prepare your entire answer to fit the 6 minutes.
I will link some amazing books and sites that helped me prepare for this down below.
Example Clinical Prioritisation Question
Here’s an example of what a Clinical prioritization question may look like:
You are an F2 on-call overnight in a DGH and you receive the following 4 bleeps. You have the following team available in the hospital:
- Obstetric registrar
- Surgical registrar
- F1 doctor
Please read through and discuss with the examiner how you would prioritise these cases.
- A
Mrs A, a 75-year-old female, is confused after an elective cholecystectomy.
Her BP is 120/78, HR is 108, sats are 96% on RA and Temp is 38.4 degrees C.
- B
Miss B, a 25-year-old female has presented with RIF pain and spotting PV.
Her BP is 90/40, HR is 112 bpm, sats are 98% on room air and temp is normal.
The urine pregnancy test was positive.
- C
Mr C, a 40-year-old male admitted for appendicitis, has been complaining of pain and nausea.
The nurse has called you as there is no analgesia or antiemetic on the drug chart and no cannula.
His BP is 138/80, HR is 80, sats are 96% on RA and temp is normal.
- D
Mr D, an 87-year-old male, was admitted following a recent diagnosis of cancer and posted for surgery.
The ward received a call from his daughter requesting information about her father.
This question gives you the opportunity to identify the most unstable patient, talk about A to E assessment, management plan such as Sepsis 6, talk about further possible investigations such as USS, escalation, and address ethical concerns like confidentiality.
Station B. Structured Interview
This is the get-to-know-you station in the O&G ST1 interview. Your assessors will ask you questions about you, your experience and about the the O&G training in general. This is the scary part for many people because they worry about this hypothetical interviewer who tsk-tsk-tsks at your answers.
The fact is that interviewers are consultants in your field who genuinely want you to do your best.
In my own interview, I could see one interviewer going the extra mile and nodding encouragingly throughout the interview. While this may not be the case everywhere, they genuinely mean well.
These questions are asked under 4 sections:
- Commitment to speciality:
- Quality Improvement measures
- Research and Teaching experience
- Experience outside of O&G, leadership and team working
Commitment to Speciality
Understanding O&G training is an absolute must here.
If you haven’t looked through it at all, I would suggest going through the RCOG website to understand the overall curriculum and structure in general and have a more detailed idea about the first year (or the first two years, as it is often clubbed). This would include competencies, courses, and exams expected of you that year.
They also expect you to know (and reasonably so), the challenges doctors may face in this specialty, how to deal with the stress, the future of O&G ( recent steps the NHS are taking ), and of course, the evergreen question- why obstetrics and gynaecology.
Something I read in a book (linked below), that helped me here was - you are talking to Obs and Gynae consultants about their speciality. They would love to hear about why their speciality is awesome!
Think about all the different aspects of OBG and why it interests you and have this written out while you prepare.
QI Measures, Research, and Teaching Experience
I have grouped these as they follow the same principle.
This part allows you to talk about the audit/QI project measures you have undertaken and the research, teaching experience, and teaching qualifications that you have so far.
Example Questions
- ’Have you done any audits?’
- ‘Tell me about your teaching experience.’
- ‘What are the levels of evidence?’
- ‘Do you think all trainees should do research?’
- 'Describe a PDSA cycle.'
- 'Tell me about a research project you have undertaken'
Advice & Tips
- Tip#3: Structure your answers
You’ll likely only be asked one question from each section. When talking about your experience, make it structured- this shows that you know what you are talking about.
For example, When talking about your audit, talk about it in the format of a PDSA cycle. When talking about your teaching experiences, group them according to the several different teaching methods.
- Tip #4: Mention your published & presented audits
When mentioning audits, or research, also mention if these have been presented/published anywhere
Experience Outside of O&G, Leadership and Team-work
Leadership and teamwork are pretty self-explanatory.
This section may ask you to take examples from your life where you displayed these characteristics. Again, if you have the time, a bit of theoretical knowledge will help improve your answer.
For example, the event “I directed a priority call”, can be made a meaningful answer once you think about ‘What makes a good leader’ or ‘what the difference is between a leader and a team player’.
