In preparation for your dental school interview with Liverpool University Dental School, you must practice beforehand with a wide range of sample interview questions in order to improve your interview skills and importantly build up on your confidence. There are various people you can rely on to help you with your Liverpool dentistry Interview Questions practise.

Preparation For The Dental Interview

Often your school teachers will agree to give you mock interviews and furthermore, you can ask your family and even friends to help you prepare for your dental school interview. You can also come to us as a university expert where we will give you a mock interview with expert analysis and feedback so that you are already performing with confidence on the appropriate day.

We also want to make sure that you don’t reinforce incorrect or inappropriate answers and bad habits. Our feedback with your mock dentistry interview is totally anonymous and also just between us and you the student. This means that we will thoroughly investigate what your ideal answers should be. So then you can fit these in with your own unique experiences such as those in your personal statement. Here at university we looked at about 100 dental school interview questions that can be asked during a Liverpool University MMI.

An interesting question that you can be asked would be the following: “Explain to us one aspect of your application that you would like us to overlook?” On the surface this may feel like an odd question to ask. However, underneath the question they are really asking you about your weaknesses or your limitations. The question may just as well be worded as what is your biggest limitation or weakness. Another way to rephrase the question is when asked, “tell us about a time you found challenging or when you failed?”

Why would Liverpool dental admissions tutors ask this question you might wonder. As a dentist you are required to work within your abilities and within your capabilities. That means you must know your strengths and your weaknesses. There is no such thing as a perfect person and everyone has weaknesses and is able to recognise these in order to have a growth mindset. Therefore think of this question as an opportunity to show when you did fail and how you developed yourself and were determined to overcome it. This could be an academic disappointment or something within your personal life or hobbies that you are participating in. Liverpool assesses you on the misfortune of experiencing but more importantly, how you then dealt with the setback or failure. They definitely want an answer which is individualised to you and you can give examples within your personal statement to reflect this. This type of limitation or weakness question is extremely common at Liverpool University Dental School and indeed all dental schools. When preparing for this type of answer, first of all, make a note of the experiences and your hobbies and ask how you might be able to draw your shortcomings from these. They may ask you about resilience. And once again you can also mention examples as discussed above. They can often ask you what you learn from this experience and how this experience made you aware of things that you were not previously aware of. They may also ask you why you are now a better person for having gone through such an experience.

Preparing Your Responses

When you are preparing your responses to this or any other question you should not be memorising an exact script. But you do have to have certain points in your mind. If you are feeling confident then your answers are smooth and flow nicely into a conversation with your interviewer.

Talking Positive Weaknesses

When talking about your weaknesses you should try to avoid weaknesses which are an essential quality of becoming a good dentist. So you shouldn’t talk about how your communication skills are one of your weakest areas. Because we know that all good dentists have good communication skills. When answering questions, Liverpool do what you may call wanting you to reflect accordingly. There are lots of examples of weaknesses that you can use, but you can always come to us if you are really struggling with your interview practice.

In all these scenarios they want to know what you learned and how if the same event happened again how you would respond differently if you would like us to help you with your dental school interview at Liverpool, just ring us for a free strategy call and we may be able to help you accordingly.

Liverpool dentistry interviews are also keen on giving you scenarios at their MMI. One of the scenarios could be as follows where you are a dentist seeing a patient and the patient is having severe dental pain. Then once you as a dentist have examined the patient, you still cannot fully investigate the pain unless you take a radiograph or an x-ray. The patient however, somehow has the notion that radiographs and X-rays are harmful and refuses to consent. In this regard, you can be asked questions on consent and what your understanding is.

Then to carry on with this scenario, you cannot make a decision about her treatment plan because you don’t have all the necessary information and you do need X rays for a necessary diagnosis. However, the patient believes that X rays are harmful and will not give you authority or consent in order to progress. When answering this question, it is important to always have an open attitude in a non judgmental way. You should also demonstrate empathy towards the patient.

You can start the conversation by asking what concerns the patient has. Patients can have many types of concerns regarding X rays such as that they cause cancer or that she might be pregnant and it may harm the baby. Assuming there are no medical contraindications for the X-rays, you can always refer to general Dental Council guidelines and also general guidelines as stipulated to healthcare professions in the UK.

You have to give this patient a balanced answer in that there are risks with exposure to radiation. However, how you as a dentist try to minimise the exposure and that the benefits will outweigh the risks. You may even be able to produce figures on how a single x-ray is quite a small dose even compared to background environmental radiation. You may also want to reassure the patient that you can use a lead apron which will reflect radiographs away from their body.

Finally

You also have to be mindful that the patient does have autonomy and it needs to be respected but you also have your own professional guidelines. You cannot make a diagnosis by guesswork. Hopefully you will have demonstrated to them that you have the necessary communication skills in addressing the patient’s concerns and how you may suggest a follow up. Also, dentists (in the correct context) use the professional term “evidence based dentistry”.

The interview admissions panel at Liverpool dental may ask you how verbal and non communication especially the nonverbal communication is essential in dentistry. They may even ask you if you saw examples during your work experience of another common scenario where you are seeing a patient that has come for an emergency appointment but they have not been for a while. The patient is apprehensive and you may want to discuss how to manage patient anxiety. 

Other questions types that could be asked at Liverpool dental interviews are how a patient requires treatment but they are unable to afford it. What kind of conversation would you have with the patient? As a dentist you should always have the well being of your patient and the practice as your main concern. However, if you decided to not make any fees for the patient, this means that the care to the rest of the patient has now become non equitable.

Also, if a practice continued to provide treatments, free of charge, then this would jeopardise long term care for all the other patients of the practice. You always have to have a balanced viewpoint. Another scenario was where you see a patient who is always cancelling at the very last minute. How would you deal with this kind of scenario?

Although Liverpool dentistry interviews require you not to have a detailed knowledge on oral health matters, nevertheless they do expect you to have certain basic information regarding oral hygiene and dental caries.

Elderly Patient Dental Interview Questions

One of the questions that a student could be asked is how an elderly patient can access good dental care and what the issues involved were. There are issues dealing with physical mobility, cognitive limitations, communication issues, including consent. As we are dealing with an ageing population increasingly it is important to know how dental care is adjusting to the ageing population.

There are also links between oral and systemic health and this might also be an important aspect to bring into this question. With the elderly there are physical limitations such as having arthritis which may make the oral hygiene procedures such as tooth brushing and flossing very, very difficult. Also, once a patient actually does come to your practice, it may be that they have difficulty manoeuvring in and out of the dental chair, including lying back.

This is where the whole team including the dental nurse and reception can guide the patient towards their dental care. Liverpool dental University plays a big emphasis on students’ well being. In this regard, you may be asked how you manage your own stress levels to prevent burnout and other mental illnesses.

As a dentist you are involved closely with patients and this may make you more susceptible to burnout. Dentistry is one of the most stressful professions and therefore dentists do need to be able to have the ability to reduce stress for the well being of their practice.

Further Possible Question

Here are further questions that you should be ready to be asked at Liverpool dental University interviews.

• Can you convince me that you will be able to cope with the high workload during your five year course at dental school?
• Tell me about a mistake that you made and how you dealt with it.
• What are your strengths and weaknesses that you can describe?
• What do you feel will be a challenging part of your dental training course here at Liverpool?
• What can you tell us about the course curriculum at Liverpool?
• Tell us why you have chosen to attend Liverpool.
• Tell us how you worked well in a team and the challenges that you faced.
• If you are concerned about your interview at Liverpool Dental School, give us a free call and we can book in a mock interview where we can teach you the basics and give you helpful feedback.
• Many of our students go on to obtain further one to one coaching so that they are already feeling confident before the big day.