Question themes
Public health, and health beyond the clinic.
Questions about what keeps a whole population well: smoking laws, vaccination, junk food, housing. They test whether you can see past the patient in front of you.
Why schools ask
Most of what decides how long people live happens outside a clinic. Income, housing, education and where you grow up shape health more than any single treatment. Doctors are asked to treat the results, and good doctors also speak up about the causes.
These stations are often policy questions. Should something be banned, taxed, funded or made compulsory. They are marked like an ethics station: both sides, then a position.
Worth knowing before the interview
- The social determinants of health. The conditions people are born, grow, live, work and age in. They explain why health follows wealth so closely, even in a country with universal health care.
- Prevention is slow and cheap. Its benefits arrive years later and are spread across many people, which makes it hard to fund and easy to cut. Tobacco control is the usual example of it working.
- Rules and freedom pull against each other. Most public health questions are a trade between protecting people and letting them choose. Seatbelts, sugar taxes and vaccination requirements all sit somewhere on that line.
- Trust is part of the treatment. Health advice only works if people believe it. Misinformation spreads faster than correction, and how doctors speak in public matters.
What a strong answer shows
- Looking for causes. Asking why a problem is common in one place and rare in another.
- The trade-off named. Who gains, and who pays for it, in money or in freedom.
- How you would know. A sense of how you would tell whether a program worked.
Where answers go wrong
- Ban it. The reflex answer to every harmful product, with no thought for who it hurts or whether it would work.
- Lecturing. Answers that blame people for their own health and stop there.
- One fix. A single campaign offered as the solution to a problem with many causes.
Three prompts to run on the clock
Thirty seconds to read each one, then two minutes to answer it out loud. Record it if you can, and listen back once.
- Should junk food advertising be banned during children’s television and online viewing hours? Argue both sides, then decide.
- Why might people in a poorer suburb die younger than people in a richer one when both have Medicare?
- A celebrity with a large online following shares a claim that a common vaccine is dangerous. What, if anything, should doctors do about it?
What these stations usually mark
Schools where it matters most
Other themes
- Ethics scenarios Most circuits have at least one.
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health Many schools ask about it, and some build their whole mission around it.
- Rural and remote health Australia does not have enough doctors outside its cities, and several schools exist partly to change that.
- Disability and healthcare access About one in five Australians lives with disability, so every doctor treats people with disability every week.
- The profession Questions about the job rather than the patient: the training, the hours, burnout, technology, how medicine is changing.
Other guides
- Start here What the interview is testing, and how the cycle runs.
- Timeline planner Put in your interview date and get a week by week plan.
- Pathway planner The whole road from school to consultant, drawn around your choices.
- Practice stations Real MMI stations with a two minute reading phase and a station clock.
- By university The interview at every undergraduate-entry school: format, timing, and what is marked.
- What is marked The six things every station marks, and how to practise each one.
- How to answer The questions every panel asks, what each is testing, and the follow-ups to expect.
- Question themes The subjects questions come from, from rural health to the profession, with prompts.
- Interview dates When each school sends invitations, holds interviews and makes offers this cycle.
- When you hear back Every school’s offer dates, and why the wait after the interview is so long.
- Formats What an MMI and a panel interview each are, and how to prepare for each.
- Interview soon? Days to go? What you can still book at short notice, and the prices.
- For parents Who your child is working with, and what I will not promise.
If you want a session
Thirty minutes, $40, online, and it comes off any package you go on to book. Tell me which schools you are applying to and which of these worries you.