Learning the key principles

The professional and ethical principles that underpin the answer logic in Situational Judgement are drawn from the General Medical Council’s Good Medical Practice booklet.

The GMC has defined the duties of a doctor in four domains of medical practice. The complete list of the four domains and the related standards can be found in Good Medical Practice.

Our experience at Medify shows that an even more useful resource to draw on in your preparation is Achieving Good Medical Practice: Guidance for Medical Students. This is a companion piece to Good Medical Practice that distils its advice specifically for students. Both versions are freely accessible from the GMC website.

In Medify SJ guidance, we’ll focus on breaking down the Achieving Good Medical Practice booklet, as this captures guidance for both doctors and medical students.

Remember, you’ll mostly be evaluating scenarios in the Situational section from the perspective of either a junior doctor or a medical student, so you need to be aware of the expected standards of behaviour for both kinds of decider.

Note that the same core principles laid out in the booklet are generally applicable to dental students and dentists as well, particularly in regards to the ethical and professional issues that arise in SJ scenarios.

You can navigate the Achieving Good Medical Practice booklet more effectively if you understand its structure and how key principles are organised.

Guidance is divided into four domains and is mainly directed at doctors. Throughout the booklet, however, blue boxes highlight guidance specifically for medical students. These sections provide clear, practical advice on how students should apply professional standards in their studies, placements and interactions.

Focus on the blue-boxed sections to quickly find relevant, actionable guidance that applies to your learning, placements and professional development as a future medical student. For future dental students, this advice will be very relevant in the context of UCAT SJ questions.

Domain 1 in Achieving Good Medical Practice is Knowledge, skills and development.

This domain focuses on the core competencies required for doctors and medical students to provide safe, effective and ethical patient care.

It emphasises the importance of clinical competence, lifelong learning and professional development, ensuring that medical professionals continually refine their skills to meet evolving healthcare challenges.

Domain 2 in Achieving Good Medical Practice is Patients, partnership and communication.

This domain focuses on the doctor-patient relationship, emphasising respect, communication and patient-centred care.

It outlines how doctors and medical students should engage with patients and their families, ensuring that medical care is safe, ethical and collaborative.

Domain 3 in Achieving Good Medical Practice is Colleagues, culture and safety.

This domain focuses on teamwork, professional conduct and maintaining a safe working environment, ensuring that doctors and medical students contribute to a respectful, supportive and safety-focused culture in healthcare.

Domain 4 in Achieving Good Medical Practice is Trust and professionalism.

This domain focuses on honesty, integrity and professional conduct, ensuring doctors and medical students uphold public trust in the profession.

It emphasises the importance of ethical behaviour, responsible communication and maintaining appropriate boundaries in all professional and personal interactions.

Medical professionals must act with transparency, fairness and accountability, ensuring that their actions reflect the high standards expected by patients, colleagues and society.

Responses or factors that demonstrate these principles directly and transparently are often very appropriate or very important, respectively.

However, always be alert to the context of the scenario, as this can determine how a principle applies to a specific situation, and how exactly to apply the principle in those particular circumstances.

A good grasp of these principles will give you a solid foundation for Situational Judgement success – but the section is more nuanced than a mere test of how well you know the guidance. It’s not simply knowing the principles, but applying the principles in each context that leads to high Situational scores.

Remember that identifying the underlying ethical or professional principle at play in a particular scenario is only the first step in selecting an answer.

In SJ, you must always consider the precise context in which a scenario plays out.

For example, a factor in an Importance set may align with a GMC standard, yet still be tangential (correct answer C) to the key issues arising from a particular scenario.

This means that, while acquainting yourself with the GMC guidance is extremely useful preparation for the section, you must always marry your understanding of the guidance with the specifics of the scenario at hand.

Take some time to read through Achieving Good Medical Practice: Guidance for Medical Students as part of your preparation.

It’s the simplest and clearest guide to the principles of medical professionalism as practised by doctors in the UK, specially tailored for medical students who will be expected to follow these principles in clinical settings.

It’s also a relatively short and easy-to-read booklet, and you’ll have to read and get to know it very well in any case once you’re a medical student. You will find useful guidance for maintaining professionalism in academic contexts as well.

It’s worth putting in a bit of time now, so that you can get more comfortable with the range of principles that could be tested in this section of the UCAT.

If you’re taking the UCAT in Australia, the Medical Board of Australia publishes a code for doctors called Good Medical Practice that covers most of the same points as the UK version.

We recommend reviewing the UK version, since this appears to be closest to the test. As of now, the medical experts who decide the correct answers in this section practise in the UK.