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Hello, everyone. Um I'm Isabel. I'm one of the um events team members at WP MN. Um Thank you for coming to um one of our getting into specialty training series and this is all about ophthalmology. Um I'll let our speaker introduce themselves, but I want to remind you to please ask questions. This is, you know, supposed to be an interruptive session all for you. Applications are ongoing at the moment. So, um we'll be taking questions via the chat function, so pop in absolutely anything. Um And then May will answer them um at the end. So I'll hand over. Hello. Hello. Thank you. Um My name is May and I am an ophthalmology one trainee currently working in London. And the first thing to say is because I'm sharing my screen, I can't see anything in the chat. I can't see anything in any polls. Um So if you just pop it in the chat and then right at the end, I'll close down the slides and then we'll go through any questions you have, feel free to ask anything either about the application process itself or about ophthalmology as you want training. Um And I'll be happy to answer any questions I can um please ignore the slider dot com uh uh uh number there. Um I was overly ambitious was hoping to put on some polls for you. Um But yes. So um with ophthalmology ST one, what we're gonna go through today, very short talk on just the components of the application process and how you get your final score for your ranking at the end of the year. Um I'm going to highlight the timeline for the 2024 0 ST one application. So if you applying this year, these are some of the important dates that you don't want to miss. Um And then we'll go through each component, three of them and I'll talk about some of the tips that I found helpful when I applied last year um in the 2023 cycle. And then right at the end, we'll do AQ and A where I answer your questions. So the first thing to say is it's a national recruitment process and we use three different components um for the application. So the very, very first part of it is the Multispecialty Recruitment assessment um which is used across quite a few specialties. But if this is new to you or if you've not uh previously graduated from a UK or trained in the NHS before, it's essentially the Multispecialty recruitment assessment, which was initially designed for GP trainees, but later was adopted across many, many different specialties um in their recruitment process. So the M SRA will talk a bit more in detail about what it's made up of. Um when I go into the tips on the M SRA, but how it's used in the ophthalmology training um application is that the highest scoring 300 candidates in the M SRA will be invited to the next step and that is to upload their portfolio. So this is quite a big change from previous years where you just needed to achieve a minimum score to then be able to upload your portfolio. Now, if you're um in the top 300 you then will receive an invitation to um upload your evidence folder and candidates who score a minimum of 40% in this evidence folder would then be invited to the final stage and that is the interview. So that means out of 50 points, you really want to try and get 20 above. And then finally, you will have to sit an online interview. Now again, this is one of the sections that has undergone quite a huge change compared to previous years. So last year for me, I just had one interview and there was a patient communication station for this year in the application process, there are two interviews that you will need to pass. The first one is a clinical consultation station and the second one is a station mainly focused around difficult communication or ethics. Again, you have to score a minimum of 40% in this component. The final score is made up of 50% from the evidence folder and 50% will be from your interview itself. Again, huge change from previous years. The M sra no longer has any weightage in the final score that's used for your ranking. It's purely used for shortlisting. Um The 300 candidates who will then proceed on to the next stages. So here are some important dates for you um for people who are applying this year. Um The first thing to say is oral applications will close on the 23rd of November. If you're even thinking at all about applying this year, I encourage you just to put an application in, you do not need to submit your portfolio by this stage. It's literally just to make sure that you are eligible um to apply. Um And if in the future, you do decide, actually, this is not the right year for me, you can always pull out um from the application process in December. After the applications on oral closes, you will then be invited to sit the M SRA. Um You'll be sent a link where you'll be able to book um uh a date in January to actually sit the assessment in February. Those of you who have scored well in the M SRA will then be invited to upload your portfolio evidence. And the deadline for that is the 13th of February and then in March, um you will have the interview, your first offers will be released no later than the 26th of March. But it often goes on a 48 hour rolling basis. So depending on whether people accept the offers every 48 hours, they will release more and more places um to the candidates that come after. So just thinking about the three components and what I help, I, what I found helpful when I applied last year. Um The very first hurdle is going to be the M SRA and it's made out of 50% clinical questions and 50% situational judgment test questions. What I would say is for the clinical questions, the level of knowledge that you're expected to know is at the level of my CK. So very much sort of a GP based, broad based knowledge and I use question banks such as FMET and M CQ Bank to guide my revision. I think if you've graduated from a UK medical school is quite helpful because these guidelines would be quite familiar to you. Um And for the situation or judgment test personally, I didn't find any external resources that helpful with prepping for this. I think it's a little bit contentious the SG at um but I used the official M sra mock paper um to try and learn how the examiners think and what they want from the candidates. You will get this paper after you have signed up for the M SRA. Um, they'll send it out via an email and a common question I get is when to start prepping. I found that two months of prep was good enough to get me through. Um, again, this is assuming that you are familiar with the UK curriculum for the foundation doctors and that you, you, you have some understanding of the N CT S guidelines. Um, I think one tip that I wish someone had taught me well, someone did tell me which I found helpful and I wish more people knew about is that you can register for a Pearson View account. Now, so this M SRA paper is an online examination, but it must take place in person in the Pearson View Center. Um And the dates go really quickly in locations that are highly sought after. A lot of them tend to be in London if you're based around the area. And ideally, you really don't want to be traveling out. You don't want to be doing the M SRA after like straight after the night shift. And so what I would say is register for an account. Now, um you won't be able to sign up for the exam because they haven't sent out the invites yet. But you will have a username and you will have a password, write these down and keep these with you because the last thing you want to do is on the day of um the registration for the M sra you don't want to be searching around for your password and trying your best to log in while people are getting the um optimal time slots for this. The next section um that's used in the ranking is standard evidence folder. Now, the most important thing I think when it comes to this section is to try and make it as easy as possible for the examiner to award you points for the 2023 cycle. Um Each evidence folder would have two examiners examiner one and two and they would inde independently give you points at the end. I think we got an average of the points. But if you had a huge difference or huge discrepancy between the two points that were awarded, that could be a trigger for them to go back and look back at your evidence folder again. No, just remembering that a lot of these examiners are really, really busy consultants and they have 100s and 100s of portfolios to go through. So try your best to make it easy. Um The layout alone will give you three points. Um get organized, you have multiple sections within the evidence folder and I highly encourage you to look at the er and diary website for the most updated evidence folder. This year, I uploaded each of my section. Uh Yeah, each of my sections as a single PDF file and all of them had its own uh contents page and I numbered all the pages accordingly to make it easier for the examiner to jump to certain pages. If they wanted to see a specific piece of evidence, I would say if possible try and arrange your evidence in the order, it, it appears as on the evidence for the page on the Deanery website. Um And if you're getting letters from consultant, try and copy down the phrase or the criteria they are looking for at verbatim into the letter and highlight that um when you have it in a PDF format to make it really, really easy for the examiners to give you the points that you deserve because you work really, really hard for this. The other thing I'll say is try as much as possible if you can to score full points in the specialty links slash commitment section, it has a total of 12 points and there are so many different things that you can do um to try and get the marks here. I think most of the people I know who, who have gotten into my dry, um half scored full marks over here and it's really not that difficult if you're organized about it. And also remember your portfolio only needs to be uploaded in February. So you do have a good 4 to 5 months from now to try and get all the low hanging fruit that you can. Some questions that I often get include. Should I do the F RC of part one or not. Um I did this exam myself um before I got into ST one. But the main reason for that was because I decided to do ophthalmology at quite a late stage and I really needed to try to get as many marks as I could. So I hadn't done an elective um in ophthalmology. I hadn't done um any undergraduate projects on this, my taste the week I did do, but I didn't really get that consistent, you know, clinic, theater time that you might get from someone who decided to do ophthalmology very early on. And so the part one gives you three marks if you pass it. And that's so what I would say is if you really need the points in this section and if you are good with bookwork and you have the capacity to, to do it, so you're doing a job that's quite easy. Or you might be doing an F three where you could study, then you could think about doing the part one. You can also try and get uh points through non peer reviewed publications. I encourage you to look at I news. Um often the editors quite happy to take any suggestions you might have. Um The only thing is I think you might need to get a consultant just to um read it with you and to agree to be an author um on the publication that you do. Um you could also look at the journal of the foundations of ophthalmologist for some really easy non peer reviewed pieces um which can score your points in this section. So I'm just putting this here as an example of how I presented the contents page because I know that some uh some of my peers got very, very stressed out about how do I score maximum points um in the layout in my head. I was just thinking, how do I make this as easy as possible for the examiner to see exactly um where my points lie. Um And so I went for very industrial look, right? Just use the table. But I made it very clear if this is an international meeting, which also I was, you know what the title of the presentation was equally in the second table. That's for the commitment to specialty section. Try to make it as clear as possible and put it in the order as it appears in the evidence folder on the c website. Fine and the last bit, if you've gotten through to the interview well done, like this is the final hurdle. Um And you should be very, very happy that you've gotten to the to this point. Now, like I say, there are major changes this year. Um There is an additional clinical station um in in, in addition to the patient consultation station, the most important thing is practice makes perfect start. Now if you want to stand a good chance of getting into the interview. And if you're serious about applying to ophthalmology, start practicing. Now, um I was quite surprised, I think there, there will be a big proportion of people who um only start practicing when they get the interview office, but they only release your offices about 1 to 2 weeks before your actual interview dates. And with these interviews, they're quite high stress, especially the patient consultation station or communication station. It's meant to be difficult, it's meant to put you out of your comfort zone. Um And so the more practice you get in the better prepared you will be for the actual interview itself. There are lots of interview question banks available. Um Personally, I use ST interview um but also I have developed this new course with Mets E it's called the Ophthalmology ST One interview course. Um which full disclosure there, there is a small fee associated with it, but we've tried to break it down into um the common themes that come up in the patient consultation station. Um And that's just an example in that um graph uh in that picture that's just included. Now, what I want to say is get yourself a group of people to practice with and try to practice with as many different people as you can. So you get a whole variety of um communication styles. It's useful, not only because it's quite nice to see how, what you say come across to different people and how they perceive it. But also because you will learn from the different people you are practicing with um try if possible to simulate the actual set up you would use in the actual interview. So we used Microsoft teams um last year in the 2023 application cycle. And I think they are you gonna do that this year? OK. So just in summary, it is a tough process but it is really, really worth it. Ok. So I am probably just three or four months in probably three months in. Um and I really, really enjoy it. I think I'm very well looked after. Um It's really interesting. It's really fascinating you get to do very intricate surgery. Um and your trainers and your seniors often very invested into training you. So I think it's really worth it. Um and go for it. If you're thinking about it, the application process can be a little bit of a marathon. So it's really important to try and make sure you don't burn out. So between each of the stages M sra you know, interview, um uploading your evidence folder, take time um to step back and remember that life is more than just the application process itself. OK? All right, good. Let's go on to any questions. If amazing. Thank you. May thank you really, some very helpful tips there with regards to the interview and also like just getting everything portfolio ready and how to lay it out as if you get points for like just the layout of your portfolio. So good points to get. We do have some questions. Um So has asked a few questions, so I'll just read them out. Um For eyesight hours. I have a really long training report and I've asked for something shorter, but the consultant said I can't get anything shorter than a 20 plus page report of hours. How can I slim this down for ease of navigation and portfolio? Josephine? Uh Number one, I think that's great. It means that you have spent quite a lot of hours on the eye side. Um I think when I submitted my evidence, um initially, I had just put in the main the first page which summarizes the total training hours that you have. But I think in, in the end, I got cold feet and I did actually include all my pages in. I didn't have 20 pages. Uh which is probably why it was doable. I think I had about eight pages in there. But what I would say Josephine is, don't worry about it if you have a very clear contents page right at the front and just put in eyesight hours, you might want to include say 20 hours, for example, and then just put page numbers from page one to page 20 page 21. What that means is if the consultant or the examiner wants to look at it. They can, if not, they can always just skip to page 22. So I think just being very clear with the contents page will be helpful. Yeah, definitely. It sounds like you've got a lot of hours as well. So that's really good. Um And then she also asked, do you only get points for part one if you pass it, if you don't pass it? Is there any point in mentioning having to sit the exam? Because I know some cases you used to get points for just sitting at for different specialties, but I'm not sure. Yeah, unfortunately, I do think you have to pass the pass part one to be able to get points for it. Um My approach to the evidence folder actually was that I just put everything in that I thought could possibly be counted. And I know that sometimes you have to weigh up the risk versus benefits because some people worry about making a very cluttered evidence folder and being mocked down the layout. Um In my case, I think I had an examiner who was very kind. Um who did give me marks. Um That may not have been explicitly stated within the criteria because I provided the evidence for it. Um So what I would say is if I were you sorry, I don't have any like formal knowledge on this, I would put it in. But there may be a risk that if you put too many things in that don't strictly fulfill the criteria, they might take one or two marks of the layout. Um She also asked, did you list other authors in your publications slash presentations? Ie the senior author. So if you're maybe not the author, um did you put the other name in? So with the presentations I didn't, um and so presentations, you know, in that little um table that I showed earlier, I would just say so under the author, I just put first author or second author and that was in reference to myself. Um But in the evidence that you provide, you do have to upload a certificate that you are, I think the presenting author or at least a letter from a consultant and you have to provide a copy of the actual poster itself. So all the other authors will come up um presumably within your poster. Um with the publications I put in, I can't really recall, but because I did have to provide a couple of different pieces of evidence, including I think the front page of the actual um publication itself. Um So I don't think I experts certainly listed them, but you would be able to see them just from the pieces of evidence that I provided the P page, the front page of the article. Um Yeah, and also they get you to fill out a form I believe with your authorship and the title, et cetera. Ok, cool. Sat here has asked this year they're asking for show impact for the non peer reviewed publications. Any idea about this? Oh, gosh, this year they have really ramped things up. So, is it very different to last year? Yeah. Yeah, I think they've made it stricter this year. Um, so previously I could just upload nope review publications without showing the, the, the impact of it. Um, I wonder if I'm really sorry. So, yeah, because I don't have experience with this. I do think it's a bit difficult sometimes in, I guess if you were looking at journal of the foundations of ophthalmology, I don't know if there might be something um that can show the number of times it was downloaded or if anyone else like your uh publication because I know they're trying to be more like an academic journal, but they're not really quite there yet. Um Whilst with I news, it really is quite difficult because it's more of a bulletin that comes through and I'm not sure they track how many people actually um read the publication. Hm. Ok. Ok. Um She has asked a few questions and I'll just read it out. Could I please ask how much did you score in your portfolio across various sections? Um And how many months did you used to study for? Part one, please? So, uh is it? Yeah, I'm sorry, but I don't, I don't specifically remember the school for different sections I can tell you to put it to the back of your mind and never think about it ever again. Yeah. So my overall score was, uh, 37 I think, roughly around the area out of 50. Um, unfortunately, I don't really remember, I think apart from trying to max out the score, um, on the commitment to specialty everything else, I don't think I have full marks or anything else. So, don't worry. Ok. Um How many months did I used to study for? Part one? I used about three months to study because I remember I probably started studying when I signed up in July and I set the exam in October. So 3 to 4 months, um I was very lucky. So again, what I would say is look at your capacity. So I started my F two in GP, which was a nice spot. I had no on calls, no weekends, no nights, which gave me the capacity to study for the part one. Um And I use ID O and I learned from the question banks and I spoke to seniors um who pointed me to resources. Um If you want to know about the resources, I'm happy to share. There are just two or three books that I think you need to have a look at and do. Um But I think I don't know if that answers your question. So I think I just had the capacity because of the job. I was doing at that point in time and I was quite desperate for the points. Yeah, fab um s also asked, what are the examples of the things you got points for that were not mentioned explicitly? Hm If you can remember. Mm uh This is a good question. So I remember for example, in the prizes section, I think there's more clarity on it this year. Um Last year when I applied, you really had to go for like national prizes or I think you had to like win a gold medal or like rank first in your year, which was all quite impossible for me. And I remember being very stressed about this, I had won sort of like small prizes um in medical school, but definitely not to that extent. And I was like, you know what, since I'm going to not score very well on this section, I'm just going to put it in anyway. And so I put in the different prizes that I won and I think they gave me one or two points for it. Um I'm just thinking about um the commitment to specialty section as well. So going for courses such as the focus course in Edinburgh, which is a foundational course for ophthalmology to teach you some really basic skills. Again, it's not explicitly listed, but I think they gave it to me as a discretionary point. Um uh in that section, anything else? I think the others were ok. If you, if you have any specific questions, um maybe I can try and help with um to see if that, that was my experience. Awesome. I'm going to do one more question just in the interest of time. Um Zain Am but says, what kind of things should I aim to be doing to maximize points during a medical school? So assuming um they're currently a medical student. Um and then how best is it to go about getting things like publications um difficult. But what can, what can she do during medical school maybe to start early? Yeah, I know you started late. But um yeah, so what I would say is do the things that you can do in medical school, right? Because there are a lot of things that I wish I could have done, but I couldn't because I, I'm not a medical student anymore. So things like the do the exam uh sit it um do an elective if you can um try and do a student selective component if you can because that opens up opportunities for projects which I think could possibly get you an additional point in undergraduate project. Um and electives, I think with publications that is the question that all of us would love to know. The answer to me too. Yeah. The good thing is that um the publications don't need to be ophthalmology specific. You can literally. So my publication wasn't ophthalmology specific. I came out of med school thinking I wanted to wanted to do medicine. So my portfolio portfolio was very much towards medicine at that point in time that will all count. So, don't worry. OK, I would say open like, you know, be open to opportunities as they arise. If you've got any publication or presentation uh opportunities just go for it because all of these will count in your portfolio. Awesome, cool. I think we're gonna end it there guys. Um If that's ok, may thank you so much for doing this. I send you all um a feedback form now, so please fill it in. That would be great. Um Hopefully everyone's got that in the chat. Um And may obviously told you about her interview course as well. So um definitely look it up um because you did very well in your interview, didn't you? So um Yeah. Um but that's it. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your evening. Thank you. Thanks. May bye bye bye.