NHS Consultant Pre-Interview Visits: A Complete Guide

• Treat the pre-interview visit as part of your NHS consultant interview preparation, not simply as a courtesy call or opportunity to introduce yourself.
• Go beyond the job description and person specification. They tell you what has been advertised; your conversations help you understand what the service actually needs.
• Meet people who can give you different perspectives on the post, particularly the clinical lead, prospective consultant colleagues and relevant operational or senior clinical leaders.
• Research the organisation and department before your visit so that you can use your meetings to explore rather than ask questions that could easily have been answered online.
• Ask different people different questions. A clinical lead, service manager and future consultant colleague will each see the department from a different perspective.
• Listen for recurring themes. If several people independently mention the same problem or priority, it is likely to matter at interview.
• Pay attention to disagreements as well as agreement. Different perspectives can reveal competing priorities, organisational pressures and areas where leadership may be required.
• Do not arrive proposing solutions before you properly understand the problem. Curiosity and judgement are usually more impressive than an instant transformation plan.
• Use what you discover to make your interview answers specific to the organisation, department and post.
• Remember that you are assessing them too. A substantive consultant appointment may shape many years of your career, so use the visit to decide whether this is genuinely the right job for you.
• Consider making contact before you apply. Keep pre-shortlisting visits focused on the department and use them to decide whether the post is right for you, understand the thinking behind the vacancy and make better sense of the job description and person specification. This can be particularly valuable for non-standard consultant posts. Not every organisation will facilitate a visit at this stage, but it is worth asking.

A pre-interview visit for an NHS consultant post is much more than an opportunity to look around the department and introduce yourself to a few senior colleagues. Done properly, it is an important part of understanding the job, preparing for the interview and deciding whether you actually want the post.

By the time a consultant vacancy is advertised, you should already have done much of the longer-term work required to make yourself competitive. Your clinical experience, teaching, quality improvement, research, leadership and other professional achievements cannot suddenly be created in the fortnight before an interview. We explore that longer-term process separately in Preparing for Your First NHS Consultant Post, which is aimed particularly at doctors approaching CCT or beginning to think about consultant applications.

Once you have identified a particular vacancy, however, your preparation changes. You are no longer asking, “How do I become a strong consultant candidate?” You are asking: “What does this particular department need from its next consultant, and how well do I fit that need?”

That is where the pre-interview visit becomes particularly valuable.

The job description and person specification provide the formal framework for the appointment. They tell you about the clinical role, qualifications required, specialist interests, proposed job plan and broad expectations of the successful candidate. What they rarely tell you is why those requirements matter, what is happening within the department, what problems the team is trying to solve or how colleagues hope the service will develop over the next few years.

Those are exactly the things you need to discover.

The Royal College of Surgeons advises consultant applicants, where possible, to arrange informal discussions with existing consultants and others who know the trust and role, while NHS careers resources also recognise the pre-interview trust visit as part of consultant interview preparation.

The real value of the visit is therefore not simply that people have seen your face before interview. It is that you arrive at the formal interview understanding the service behind the paperwork.

There are really two objectives, and candidates sometimes concentrate so heavily on the first that they forget the second.

The first is to understand what the organisation is actually looking for. Everyone who reaches a consultant interview should broadly satisfy the essential criteria in the person specification. The panel therefore has to distinguish between candidates who may all be appointable on paper. Understanding what the department needs beyond those minimum requirements can help you decide which parts of your experience are particularly relevant and which themes deserve most attention in your preparation.

The second objective is to decide whether you want the job. This matters enormously. A substantive consultant appointment may last for many years. The specialty interest may look perfect on paper, but the workload, team culture, resources, organisational expectations or future direction of the department may not suit you. Equally, a post that initially seemed relatively ordinary may become much more attractive once you understand the people, opportunities and ambitions behind it.

A good pre-interview visit should therefore leave you able to answer three questions:

• What does this department and organisation need from its next consultant?
• How could my genuine strengths and experience contribute to those needs?
• Would I actually like to work here?

Those questions should remain at the centre of the whole process.

Whether you are considering making contact before applying or have already been shortlisted, go back to the job description, person specification and proposed job plan and read them carefully. Look not only at what they say, but at what they might imply.

Why is a particular subspecialty interest specified? Is the department expanding that service, replacing somebody who previously led it or filling a gap within the consultant team? If teaching is repeatedly emphasised, is there a major undergraduate programme or a need for somebody to take on educational leadership? If research appears unusually prominently, is there a genuine academic programme behind it? If leadership and service development are stressed, is the department expecting significant change?

This is where you start generating questions for the visit. You should also research the organisation itself. Understand its broad strategy, major service developments, relevant quality and performance issues, teaching and research relationships and any significant changes affecting your specialty. You do not need to read every NHS report or memorise hundreds of pages of strategy documents. Focus on information that helps you understand the organisation, the department and the context of the post.

The purpose of doing this research beforehand is simple: do not waste valuable time with senior colleagues asking questions that Google, the trust website or the job description could have answered for you.

Instead of asking: “Are there any developments planned for the department?”, you might be able to ask: “I saw that the trust is planning to expand X over the next two years. How do you see that affecting the department and this particular consultant role?”

The second question takes the conversation somewhere useful.

For a broader approach to researching the organisation, anticipating interview themes and preparing your answers once you have been shortlisted, see our separate guide to How to Prepare for an NHS Consultant Interview.

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Who should you meet before an NHS consultant interview?

There is no universal list of people every consultant candidate must meet. The right people depend upon the specialty, seniority and nature of the post. The aim is not to collect as many senior names as possible or conduct a ceremonial tour of the organisation. You are trying to understand the job from several different perspectives.

Five meaningful conversations are likely to be much more useful than twelve superficial introductions.

Who you meet	What you are mainly trying to understand
Clinical lead/service lead	Departmental priorities, current pressures, future plans, gaps within the team and what they want from the successful candidate
Prospective consultant colleagues	Day-to-day reality of the job, consultant relationships, workload, culture, on-call arrangements and what they want from their new colleague
Clinical/divisional director	Wider divisional strategy, performance, workforce and how the department fits into broader organisational priorities
General/service manager	Demand, capacity, waiting lists, staffing, finance, operational pressures and planned service change
Senior nursing/AHP colleagues	MDT working, pathways, workforce development, patient experience and team culture
Medical director	Medical strategy, quality, workforce, leadership expectations and organisational priorities
Chief executive	Overall organisational strategy and the contribution expected from the consultant body
Trust/organisation Chair	Board-level priorities, governance, organisational culture and values, strategic direction and the contribution expected from senior clinicians
Academic/educational lead	Research infrastructure, teaching responsibilities, academic expectations and opportunities
Closely related specialties	Interfaces, dependencies, referral pathways and opportunities or difficulties in joint working

You do not necessarily need to meet all of these people. Think instead about what you still need to understand after reading the job description and researching the service, and identify the people best placed to answer those questions.

Do not worry if you cannot meet everyone on the list. A pre-interview visit is not a checklist in which every individual must be seen, and senior people may simply not be available within the relatively short period between shortlisting and interview.

There is also considerable overlap in what different people can tell you. For example, the Medical Director and Chief Executive may both be able to discuss organisational priorities, culture, workforce challenges and expectations of the consultant body. A Clinical or Divisional Director may be able to give you useful information about both the wider organisation and the pressures facing the department. Similarly, a Clinical Lead may be able to answer many of the questions you would otherwise have asked prospective consultant colleagues.

Concentrate on obtaining the information and perspectives you need, rather than completing a predetermined list of meetings. If somebody is unavailable, think about who else is likely to understand that aspect of the organisation or post.

There are, however, some perspectives that are harder to substitute. Speaking to the Clinical Lead is particularly valuable for understanding why the post exists and what the department needs from its next consultant, while prospective consultant colleagues can often tell you things about the day-to-day reality of the job that senior managers cannot.

If an important person cannot meet you, it may also be possible to arrange a short telephone or video conversation instead. You do not necessarily need a formal face-to-face meeting to obtain useful insight.

The important thing is that, by the end of your visits and conversations, you have developed a rounded understanding of the department, the post, the wider organisation and the people you may be working with. That matters far more than being able to say that you met every person on a suggested list.

The people you meet during your pre-interview visits do not have to correspond exactly with the people who will eventually sit on the interview panel. The purpose of the visit is to understand the post, department and organisation, rather than simply to meet the interviewers in advance.

For example, you may meet the Chief Executive during your visit but subsequently discover that the Chief Executive will not personally sit on the panel and will instead be represented by another senior executive, the HR Director or another appropriate senior representative. That does not make the conversation with the Chief Executive any less useful. Their perspective may still help you understand the organisation's strategic priorities, culture and expectations of its consultant body.

Indeed, there can be an advantage in speaking to the substantive senior leader where possible. A person substituting for the Chief Executive, Medical Director or another senior leader on the interview panel will not necessarily have the same depth of knowledge about the issues you want to explore. They may be very well informed about the organisation generally, but may not be able to give you the same insight into the individual's priorities, current concerns or expectations of the consultant body.

This is particularly relevant when asking broader questions about organisational strategy, medical leadership, culture, values or the future direction of the Trust. If you have the opportunity to speak to the Chief Executive or Medical Director themselves, therefore, it can still be worthwhile even when you know that somebody else will represent them at interview.

Equally, if you know who will be representing that organisational perspective on the panel, it may be useful to meet them as well if this can reasonably be arranged. They may bring a different and equally useful perspective. However, you do not need to turn your pre-interview visit into an exercise in meeting every member of the panel.

Think about perspectives rather than names. Have you understood what the department needs? Do you understand the operational and divisional pressures? Do you have a sense of the organisation's strategy, culture and values? Do you understand what will be expected of you as a consultant? If you have obtained those perspectives from appropriate people, it matters much less whether every person you spoke to subsequently appears on the interview panel.

Remember also that the composition of the panel can change. Someone may become unavailable and be substituted at relatively short notice. Your preparation should therefore be based on understanding the organisation and the post, rather than trying to tailor yourself to a particular collection of individuals.

For most consultant applicants, the clinical lead or service lead will be one of the most important people to meet. This person should have a good understanding of both the daily realities of the department and where it is trying to go.

You want to explore the major priorities for the next few years, the pressures currently facing the service, planned developments and, crucially, why this particular vacancy exists. Is it a replacement post? If so, what did the previous consultant contribute? Is it a new post created because the service is expanding? Is there a particular gap within the existing consultant team? Is somebody approaching retirement whose leadership, educational or specialist responsibilities will eventually need to be absorbed?

One particularly useful question is: “If you were looking back two or three years after the appointment, what would you hope the successful candidate had contributed to the department?”

That moves the conversation beyond the immediate vacancy and towards the real expectations attached to the post.

The answer might reveal that the department wants somebody to establish a new service, strengthen teaching, develop research, improve governance, redesign a pathway or eventually take on leadership responsibilities. Those details may never appear explicitly in the person specification, but they could be central to the panel's thinking.

This is not about trying to extract the interview questions from the clinical lead. If you understand the department sufficiently well, many of the likely themes of the interview will become predictable without anybody telling you the questions.

Your future consultant colleagues can give you a different perspective. The clinical lead may understandably talk about strategy, priorities and departmental development; existing consultants can often tell you what working there is actually like.

Explore how the consultant team works together, how clinical responsibilities are divided, what the on-call arrangements are like, how cross-cover works and where the major pressures occur. Ask about relationships with management, junior staff and other professional groups. Find out how decisions are made and whether consultants have genuine opportunities to develop their interests.

A simple question can be particularly revealing: “What would you most like your new consultant colleague to bring to the department?”

Ask more than one consultant and you may receive very different answers. One may want somebody who will help develop teaching. Another may be concerned about workload. Another may see an opportunity to expand a specialist service, while somebody else may want a colleague willing to become involved in management.

Those differences are useful. You are beginning to see the department from multiple perspectives rather than accepting a single official narrative.

This is also your opportunity to assess the consultant team itself. You may work alongside these people for many years. Do they appear mutually supportive? Do they speak respectfully about colleagues? Can they discuss disagreements constructively? Does the department feel like somewhere you could build a career?

Consultants do not work in a purely clinical environment. Many of the challenges you will encounter as a consultant involve workforce, capacity, finance, pathways, productivity, quality, performance and competing organisational priorities. Speaking to operational and senior clinical leaders can therefore provide information that you will not obtain from clinical colleagues alone.

A general or service manager may be particularly helpful in explaining activity, waiting lists, staffing vacancies, clinic or theatre capacity, pathway inefficiencies and planned operational changes. If the clinical team tells you that a particular service needs to expand, the manager may help you understand the practical constraints around doing so.

The clinical or divisional director can provide a broader perspective again. What are the priorities for the division? Where does your prospective department sit within them? Is the organisation expecting growth, consolidation, transformation or improved productivity? Are there financial or workforce pressures that will influence what the department can realistically achieve?

If you meet the Medical Director or Chief Executive, move the conversation further upwards. This is the opportunity to understand organisational strategy, medical leadership, quality, workforce and the expectations placed upon consultants as senior doctors. It is not the time to ask the Chief Executive detailed questions about your Tuesday afternoon clinic.

Each conversation should therefore add another layer to your understanding rather than simply repeating the same questions.

Depending on local practice, it may also be appropriate to ask to meet the Chair of the Trust or organisation. The Chair can offer a different perspective from the Chief Executive or Medical Director, particularly around Board priorities, organisational culture and values, governance and the contribution expected from senior clinicians.

Not all Chairs agree to meet consultant candidates, and in some organisations the Chair may routinely decline such requests. It can nevertheless be worth asking. Making the approach demonstrates that you have thought about the organisation beyond the immediate department and have made an effort to understand it at Board level.

There can also be an important element of local convention here. In our experience of preparing doctors for NHS consultant interviews, we know of at least two occasions where unsuccessful candidates were subsequently told that they had not approached the Chair before interview. In both cases, the Chair did not normally meet candidates anyway. The issue was therefore not that the candidate had failed to secure a meeting, but that they had not made the approach.

This should not be interpreted as a universal NHS requirement, because it is not. Local expectations vary considerably. However, if you are applying for a substantive consultant post and it appears customary for candidates to approach senior organisational leaders, there is little to lose by politely asking whether the Chair would be available for a brief meeting. If the answer is no, you have still demonstrated that you made the effort.

If you do meet the Chair, use the opportunity appropriately. Questions about the organisation's strategic direction, culture, major opportunities and challenges, and what the Board values in its consultant body are much more suitable than detailed questions about your job plan or departmental rota.

A common mistake is to arrive with a list of ten prepared questions and ask every person exactly the same things. There is some value in asking similar questions because it allows you to compare perspectives, but the real advantage of meeting different people is that they know different things.

Ask the clinical lead about departmental priorities and gaps within the consultant team. Ask existing consultants about the practical reality of the workload and culture. Ask operational managers about capacity, demand and workforce. Ask senior nursing or allied health professional colleagues about pathways, multidisciplinary working and patient experience. Ask senior medical leaders about organisational strategy and expectations of consultants.

There can still be deliberate overlap. Asking several people what they see as the department's greatest challenge, for example, can be extremely informative. What matters is that you are not mechanically working through the same questionnaire.

Think of the process as gradually building a three-dimensional picture of the post.

The questions you ask should depend on whom you are meeting and what you have already discovered about the post. You do not need to ask every question below, and doing so would probably make the conversation feel more like an interrogation than a pre-interview visit. Instead, choose the questions that will help fill the gaps in your understanding.

Avoid asking for information you could easily have found yourself. The most useful questions are generally open questions that encourage the person to explain how they see the department, its challenges and the role of the new consultant.

Questions to ask the clinical lead or service lead

This is usually one of your most important conversations. Your aim is to understand where the department is going, what it needs and why this particular consultant is being recruited.

• Why has this post become available?
• Is this a replacement post or a newly created position?
• If it is a replacement post, are there particular responsibilities previously undertaken by the outgoing consultant that will need to be covered?
• What are the department's main priorities over the next two to three years?
• What are the biggest challenges facing the service at present?
• Are there particular areas of the service that you would like to develop?
• What gaps currently exist within the consultant team?
• What particular skills or interests would you ideally like the new consultant to bring?
• How do you see this post developing over the next few years?
• Are there significant service changes or developments already planned?
• How does the department fit into the wider priorities of the division and organisation?
• Are there areas where relationships or pathways with other specialties need to develop?
• What are the main workforce challenges within the department?
• Are there particular quality, governance or performance priorities?
• How would you describe the culture of the consultant team?
• What opportunities are there for a new consultant to become involved in service development, teaching, research or leadership?
• If we were having this conversation again in two or three years, what would you hope the successful candidate had achieved?

That final question is particularly useful because it often reveals far more about the real purpose of the appointment than asking, “What are you looking for?”

Questions to ask prospective consultant colleagues

With future colleagues, concentrate more on the lived reality of working within the department. You are also trying to establish whether these are people with whom you would be happy working for many years.

• How does the consultant team work together in practice?
• How are responsibilities divided between consultants?
• How much flexibility is there within individual job plans?
• What is the clinical workload actually like?
• Where are the greatest pressures during a typical week?
• How does cross-cover work?
• What is the on-call commitment like in reality?
• How is prospective cover managed?
• How easy is it to take study or annual leave while maintaining service cover?
• How are decisions about the service made?
• How would you describe the relationship between the consultant team and management?
• How well does the multidisciplinary team work?
• Which other departments or specialties do you work most closely with?
• Are there any interfaces with other services that are particularly challenging?
• What changes have taken place in the department recently?
• What do you think will change most over the next few years?
• What are the most frustrating aspects of working here?
• If you could change one thing about the service, what would it be?
• What would you most like your new consultant colleague to bring to the department?

The last few questions can be particularly revealing. They often produce a much more candid picture than asking whether it is “a good department to work in”.

Questions to ask the service manager or general manager

Managers can help you understand the operational reality behind the clinical service. This is particularly important if the post involves service development or if performance, capacity or workforce issues appear to be significant.

• What are the service's main operational priorities?
• Where are the greatest pressures on capacity?
• How has demand changed over recent years?
• Are there significant waiting-list or access challenges?
• Where are the main bottlenecks in the patient pathway?
• Are there particular performance measures that the service is struggling to achieve?
• What are the main workforce challenges?
• Are there persistent vacancies or difficult-to-recruit professional groups?
• Are there plans to change the workforce or skill mix?
• Are there major service redesign projects underway or planned?
• What developments are likely to affect the department over the next few years?
• How well do the clinical and management teams work together?
• How are consultants involved in business planning and service development?
• How easy is it to develop a business case for service change?
• Are there significant financial or productivity pressures affecting the department?
• What would you particularly like the new consultant to contribute?
• From an operational perspective, what would success in this appointment look like?

These conversations can help you understand whether an apparently clinical problem is actually being driven by capacity, workforce, finance, estates or another operational constraint.

Questions to ask the clinical or divisional director

At this level, broaden your perspective. You are trying to understand how the department fits within the wider division and what senior clinical leadership expects from its consultants.

• What are the main priorities for the division over the next few years?
• Where does this department sit within those priorities?
• What are the division's major clinical and operational challenges?
• Are there important service changes or reconfigurations planned?
• Where do you see the greatest opportunities for development?
• Are there particular workforce challenges across the division?
• What are the main quality and governance priorities?
• How are consultants involved in divisional decision-making?
• What do you expect from consultants beyond delivering their individual clinical workload?
• What opportunities are there for consultants to become involved in leadership?
• How are new consultants supported in developing leadership or management responsibilities?
• Are there areas where greater collaboration between specialties is needed?
• What would you particularly value from the person appointed to this post?
• How do you think this role might evolve over the next five years?

This conversation can be particularly useful for understanding whether the department's ambitions align with the priorities of the wider organisation.

Questions to ask senior nursing or allied health professional colleagues

Senior nurses and AHPs can provide a perspective on the service that you will not necessarily obtain from doctors or managers. Their views can be particularly valuable when understanding patient pathways, team culture and opportunities for workforce development.

• How does the multidisciplinary team work in practice?
• How would you describe relationships between the different professional groups?
• What works particularly well within the current pathway?
• Where do patients experience the greatest difficulties or delays?
• Are there parts of the pathway you think could work better?
• What are the main nursing or AHP workforce challenges?
• Are advanced or extended roles being developed?
• Are there opportunities to make better use of the wider multidisciplinary workforce?
• How are nurses and AHPs involved in service development?
• How accessible and supportive is the consultant team?
• What makes consultant–MDT relationships work particularly well here?
• Are there areas where you would like greater consultant involvement?
• What changes would make the biggest difference to patients?
• What would you particularly value in the new consultant?

This can also tell you a great deal about the culture you may be joining. A consultant post is rarely successful in isolation from the wider multidisciplinary team.

Questions to ask the medical director

The Medical Director conversation should usually be broader and more strategic. Do not use valuable time discussing the minutiae of the departmental timetable.

• What are the organisation's main clinical priorities over the next few years?
• What do you see as the biggest challenges facing the organisation?
• What are the major quality and patient-safety priorities?
• What are the main medical workforce challenges?
• What do you expect from consultants as senior clinicians within the organisation?
• How would you describe the relationship between the consultant body and senior leadership?
• How are consultants encouraged to become involved in quality improvement and service transformation?
• What opportunities are available for consultants who want to develop leadership roles?
• How does the organisation support newly appointed consultants?
• Are there particular areas in which you would like greater medical leadership?
• What changes do you think will most affect consultants working here over the next five years?
• What characteristics do you particularly value in consultants joining the organisation?

You are trying to understand what it means to be a consultant in this organisation, not simply in this department.

Questions to ask the chief executive

If you have the opportunity to meet the Chief Executive, keep the conversation at organisational level. You are interested in where the organisation is going and how senior clinicians contribute to that direction.

• What are the organisation's most important priorities over the next three to five years?
• What do you see as its greatest opportunities?
• What are the biggest challenges to achieving those ambitions?
• What distinguishes this organisation from others?
• How would you describe the culture you are trying to develop?
• What do you see as the role of the consultant body in delivering the organisation's strategy?
• What do you expect from consultants beyond their clinical responsibilities?
• Where do you think greater clinical leadership is particularly needed?
• How do you see relationships with the wider integrated care system and neighbouring organisations developing?
• If you could change one thing about the organisation over the next few years, what would it be?
• What would you want a new consultant joining the organisation to understand from the outset?

You are unlikely to have time for many questions, so select two or three that genuinely help you understand the organisation.

Questions to ask the trust or organisation chair

If the Chair agrees to meet you, think about the organisation from a Board, governance and cultural perspective. This should not simply duplicate your conversation with the Chief Executive.

• • From the Board's perspective, what are the organisation's major priorities?
• • What do you see as the greatest challenges facing the organisation over the next few years?
• • How would you describe the culture of the organisation?
• • What values do you particularly want to see demonstrated by senior clinicians?
• • How does the Board engage with the consultant body?
• • What do you see as the consultant body's contribution to good organisational governance?
• • What do you particularly value in consultants joining the organisation?
• • Where do you think clinicians can make the greatest contribution beyond their immediate specialty?
• • What would you like a newly appointed consultant to understand about the organisation?

Remember that not all Chairs meet candidates. In some organisations, the value may simply be in having made an appropriate approach rather than securing the meeting itself.

Questions to ask an academic or research lead

For an academic post, or a consultant job in which research features prominently, establish whether the opportunities described in the advertisement are genuinely deliverable.

• What are the department's principal research interests?
• What research programmes are currently active?
• Which areas is the department hoping to develop?
• What would be expected of the successful candidate academically?
• Is there protected research time within the post?
• What research infrastructure is available?
• Are there research nurses, trial coordinators, statisticians or other support?
• What university relationships exist?
• What opportunities are there for collaborative research?
• How are consultants supported in developing grant applications?
• Are there opportunities to act as a principal investigator?
• What teaching responsibilities accompany the academic role?
• How is academic performance assessed?
• How have previous consultants developed their academic careers here?
• What would you hope the person appointed had achieved academically within three to five years?

For a post with a significant academic component, vague promises of “research opportunities” are not enough. You need to understand what time, infrastructure and expectations sit behind them.

Questions to ask an educational lead

Where teaching is an important component of the role, explore what that actually means rather than assuming all teaching opportunities are equivalent.

• What undergraduate and postgraduate teaching does the department provide?
• Which trainees rotate through the department?
• What educational supervision responsibilities would the new consultant have?
• Are there particular gaps in the current teaching programme?
• Are there opportunities to develop new teaching initiatives?
• Is simulation used within the specialty?
• Are there opportunities for educational leadership?
• What relationship does the department have with the medical school or university?
• How is teaching recognised within consultant job plans?
• Are there opportunities to develop formal educational roles?
• What would you particularly like the new consultant to contribute educationally?

This can help establish whether education is genuinely valued and resourced or simply included as a generic line in the person specification.

Questions to ask colleagues in closely related specialties

For some consultant posts, the success of your service will depend heavily on relationships with other departments. Speaking to those colleagues can reveal important issues that are invisible from within your prospective department.

• How do the two services currently work together?
• Which parts of the pathway work particularly well?
• Where are the main difficulties or delays?
• Are referral arrangements clear and effective?
• Are there areas of disagreement about clinical responsibility?
• Are there opportunities to develop joint pathways or services?
• Are there regular multidisciplinary meetings?
• How easy is it to resolve problems between the departments?
• Are there developments planned that will affect both services?
• What would you value from the new consultant?
• Is there anything you think somebody joining the department should understand about how our services interact?

If several related specialties independently identify the same interface problem, that may become an important theme to explore further.

As with other publicly available information, you should already know the Trust's stated values before your visit. There is little value in asking somebody to tell you what the values are when they are clearly displayed on the organisation's website. The more useful conversation is about what those values actually mean in practice and how they influence the culture, behaviours and expectations of consultants within the organisation.

There will always be questions on trust values at the interview and most candidates give very cheesy answers. If you want to give an answer that sounds remotely intelligent, try to move beyond the wording of the values themselves. A Trust may describe itself as compassionate, inclusive, respectful, collaborative or ambitious, but the important questions are how those principles affect everyday behaviour, how leaders try to embed them and what is expected of consultants as senior members of the organisation.

Useful questions will depend on whom you are meeting. For example:

• Clinical Lead: How do the Trust's values translate into the way the department works day to day?
• Clinical Lead: Are there particular behaviours that you especially value within the consultant team?
• Consultant colleagues: Do you feel the stated Trust values reflect the culture of the department in practice?
• Consultant colleagues: What behaviours make somebody a particularly good colleague within this team?
• Senior nursing/AHP colleagues: What do you most value in the way consultants work with the wider multidisciplinary team?
• Service Manager: How would you describe the working culture between the clinical and management teams?
• Medical Director: How do you expect consultants to demonstrate the organisation's values in their clinical, professional and leadership roles?
• Medical Director: Are there particular behaviours you regard as especially important for senior medical staff?
• Chief Executive: How do you try to ensure that the Trust's values are experienced in practice rather than simply stated?
• Chief Executive: What behaviours do you particularly want consultants, as senior members of the organisation, to model?
• Chair: From the Board's perspective, how do you know whether the organisation is genuinely living its stated values?
• Chair: What role do you see consultants playing in shaping and protecting the culture of the organisation?

These conversations are particularly useful when preparing for questions about Trust values, teamwork, leadership, conflict, professionalism and organisational culture. At consultant interview, simply being able to recite the values is unlikely to be enough. You should be able to demonstrate through examples how your own behaviour aligns with them and how, as a consultant, you would help model those behaviours for others.

Listen carefully to the language people use during your visits. If several senior leaders repeatedly emphasise a particular value or behaviour, that may tell you something about what the organisation considers especially important. It may also help you choose the most relevant examples from your own experience when preparing for interview.

The visit also gives you an opportunity to assess the organisation from the other direction. Do the behaviours and culture you observe appear consistent with the values the Trust publishes? You are considering joining the organisation potentially for many years, so that question matters to you as well as to the interview panel.

EDI is one of the most difficult topics to approach at an interview. And, as such, you should make sure you know exactly what their views and approaches are on the matter. You should already have looked at the organisation's published equality, diversity and inclusion priorities and, where relevant, information about its workforce and the population it serves. The purpose of the visit is not to ask somebody to summarise an EDI strategy that you could have read yourself, but to understand where the organisation sees its real challenges and priorities.

Think about both patients and the workforce. For patients, this might include inequalities in access, experience or outcomes, the needs of particular communities and how services are adapting to the population they serve. For staff, you might explore inclusion, progression, recruitment, differential experiences between staff groups and what is being done to create an environment in which people feel able to contribute and speak up.

Useful questions will depend on whom you are meeting. For example:

• Clinical Lead: Are there particular inequalities in access, experience or outcomes that the department is currently trying to address?
• Clinical Lead: Are there patient groups or communities that the service finds particularly difficult to reach or serve effectively?
• Consultant colleagues: How inclusive does the culture of the department feel in practice, and are there areas where you think it could improve?
• Senior nursing/AHP colleagues: Are there groups of patients whose needs are not as well met by the current pathway?
• Service Manager: Do your data show important differences in access, experience or outcomes between different patient groups?
• Medical Director: What do you see as the most important EDI challenges for the medical workforce, and what role do you expect consultants to play in addressing them?
• Chief Executive: Where do you think the organisation still has the most work to do on equality and inclusion, either for patients or staff?
• Chair: From the Board's perspective, how do you assess whether progress on equality and inclusion is actually being achieved rather than simply whether policies and initiatives are in place?

These conversations can be particularly useful because EDI questions at consultant interview should not be approached as an exercise in repeating definitions or organisational slogans. At consultant level, you should be able to discuss inequalities in healthcare, inclusive leadership, fair treatment of colleagues, the use of data to identify disparities and your responsibility to challenge discrimination and improve services where particular groups experience poorer access, experience or outcomes.

If the organisation has identified specific inequalities or EDI priorities, understanding them before interview also allows you to think about relevant examples from your own experience and how you could contribute as a consultant.

These questions are a menu, not a script. In most meetings you may only need five or six of them, and some of the best information will emerge from follow-up questions you could never have prepared in advance.

If somebody tells you that recruitment is their biggest challenge, explore it. If they mention that the department has recently tried to redesign a pathway, ask what happened. If they say that relationships with another service have been difficult, find out why. The conversation should respond to what you are hearing.

You should also allow the person you are meeting to ask about you. A pre-interview visit is a professional conversation between potential future colleagues, not a fact-finding interrogation.

The aim is to leave each meeting understanding something you did not understand when you arrived. Once you put those conversations together, you can begin looking for the recurring themes that tell you what really matters to the department and organisation.

One of the most useful things you can do during a pre-interview visit is to stop thinking of each conversation as a separate encounter and instead start looking for themes that recur across different people.

Imagine, for example, that the clinical lead tells you that demand has increased substantially and the department is struggling with capacity. A consultant then says that some routine work probably needs to be delivered differently. The service manager tells you that the biggest operational problem is the waiting list, while the senior nurse comments that advanced practitioners could perhaps be used more effectively.

Those are not four unrelated observations. They are different perspectives on the same underlying problem: capacity, pathway design and workforce utilisation.

That matters because interview panels rarely ask questions in the same language used during your pre-interview visit. You may never be asked, “What would you do about our capacity problem?” Instead, the issue may appear indirectly in a question about service development, quality improvement, workforce planning, productivity, leadership, your first year in post or your vision for the department.

The value of the pre-interview visit is therefore not simply that it gives you more facts. It helps you understand the recurring pressures and ambitions that sit behind the post.

As you speak to different people, keep asking yourself: What am I hearing repeatedly? What seems to matter to several different people? What problems are being described in slightly different ways?

If three or four people independently mention the same issue, you should assume that it is important. It may represent a major departmental pressure, a strategic priority or something that the successful candidate will be expected to help address.

Once you have completed your meetings, regroup your notes into themes rather than simply retaining a chronological record of who said what. You might find that most of what you heard falls into areas such as workforce, waiting times, service redesign, teaching, research, governance, succession planning or relationships with another specialty.

Those themes should feed directly into your interview preparation.

Repeated themes are useful, but differences between conversations can be equally revealing.

Imagine that the clinical lead regards expansion of a specialist service as the major priority. The general manager concentrates on waiting times and productivity. Existing consultants repeatedly mention rota gaps, while nursing colleagues are particularly interested in pathway redesign and extending professional roles.

These perspectives do not necessarily contradict one another. In fact, they may describe the central leadership challenge facing the department: it wants to expand a specialist service while simultaneously managing demand, improving performance and dealing with workforce constraints.

That is much richer information than simply learning that “the department plans to expand service X”.

It should also influence how you answer questions at interview. A simplistic answer might enthusiastically describe how you would expand the service. A more credible consultant-level answer would recognise that any development needs to consider workforce, demand, capacity, resources, stakeholders and the effect on existing services.

This is one reason pre-interview visits can help distinguish sophisticated answers from generic ones. You start to understand not just what the organisation wants to achieve, but the constraints within which it has to achieve it.

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Understand what they really want from their next consultant

By the end of your conversations, you should be developing an answer to perhaps the most important question of the entire exercise: What are they really recruiting this consultant to do?

The advertisement might describe a “Consultant in X with a specialist interest in Y”, but that may tell only part of the story.

The department may actually need somebody who can stabilise an overstretched service, develop a new pathway, strengthen undergraduate teaching, rebuild a research programme, improve governance, take over responsibilities from a retiring consultant, improve relationships with another specialty or eventually become clinical lead.

This does not mean trying to reinvent yourself to fit whatever you think they want. If the department desperately wants an academic researcher and research has never interested you, discovering that before the interview may tell you something important about whether this is the right post.

The valuable situation is where their needs genuinely intersect with your strengths and ambitions.

That intersection should become one of the central themes of your interview preparation.

The proposed job plan deserves much more attention than candidates sometimes give it. A consultant post is not simply a title and subspecialty interest; it is a working week that you may be delivering for years.

Look carefully at the balance between Direct Clinical Care and Supporting Professional Activities, the on-call commitment, cross-site working, administration, teaching, supervision and any management or research responsibilities. Ask how fixed the advertised timetable is and whether the stated activities realistically fit into the allocated time.

NHS consultant job planning should reflect service demand, clinical and non-clinical activity, capacity, workforce and organisational objectives. The pre-interview visit allows you to understand the context behind the timetable rather than simply reading a table of programmed activities.

Depending upon the post, you may also need to understand the practical resources available. If you are being recruited to develop a specialist service, will there be clinic space, theatre capacity, nursing support, administrative support, diagnostic capacity or equipment? If research is an important attraction, is there genuine research infrastructure and protected time? If education is heavily promoted, what teaching responsibilities and opportunities actually exist?

A phrase such as “excellent opportunities for research, teaching and service development” sounds attractive. Your visit should help establish what those opportunities mean in practice.

Your first consultant post should ideally allow your career to develop rather than simply provide a clinical timetable.

If education matters to you, ask about undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, educational supervision, simulation, faculty development and opportunities for educational leadership. If research is important, explore existing research programmes, university relationships, trials, research staff, infrastructure, funding and protected time.

Similarly, ask how consultants become involved in governance, quality improvement, digital transformation, management and clinical leadership. Is there support for new consultants who want to develop in these areas? How have existing consultants progressed within the organisation?

This is particularly relevant if you are thinking about your consultant profile well before applying. Our guide to Preparing for Your First NHS Consultant Post looks in much greater detail at developing experience across clinical practice, teaching, quality improvement, research, leadership and service development during the final stages of specialty training.

The pre-interview visit then allows you to discover which parts of that profile are particularly valuable to this specific organisation.

Enthusiasm is valuable. Instant solutions are not always.

Suppose somebody tells you that the department has a major waiting-list problem. It can be tempting to demonstrate your service-development credentials immediately: “I would introduce a one-stop clinic and redesign the referral pathway.”

Perhaps that is exactly what the department needs. Perhaps it tried precisely that two years ago and it failed.

A better response is to explore the problem:

• “What do you think is driving the waiting list?”
• “Where are the main constraints?”
• “What has already been tried?”
• “Are there changes currently being considered?”

This demonstrates curiosity, judgement and respect for the people already working within the service.

Consultant-level service development generally requires understanding the problem, reviewing evidence and data, engaging stakeholders, considering resources and evaluating options before deciding upon an intervention. Your behaviour during the visit should reflect the same mindset.

You can certainly discuss ideas where appropriate, but phrases such as “One area I would be interested in exploring…” generally land better than “What you need to do is…”

Remember that you are not simply gathering material for your interview answers. You are considering whether to spend a substantial part of your career within this organisation.

If you visit physically, observe the department. How do people interact? Does the environment appear organised? Do different professional groups communicate comfortably? Do consultants speak positively about one another? Are staff willing to acknowledge problems? Does the service appear to have a sense of direction?

Do not overinterpret a single interaction or a difficult afternoon. NHS services are busy environments and every department has pressures. Look instead for patterns.

The way people talk about problems can be particularly informative. A department that openly acknowledges its difficulties and can explain what it is trying to do about them may be much healthier than one in which everybody insists that nothing is wrong.

You are looking for a workplace in which you can contribute, develop and function effectively over the long term.

Every NHS service has challenges, so discovering problems should not automatically deter you. What matters is their nature, whether they are recognised and whether there is a realistic plan for addressing them.

You should, however, investigate further if you repeatedly encounter significant discrepancies between the advertised job and what people describe, unclear explanations for why the vacancy exists, unrealistic workload expectations, severe staffing instability, obvious conflict within the consultant team, poor relationships between professional groups or major developments being promised without credible resources.

Contradictory expectations also deserve attention. If one person tells you that the successful candidate will be expected to build a major new service while another tells you there is no capacity or funding for it, you need to understand that discrepancy.

The aim is not to hunt for red flags. It is to go into a potentially long-term appointment with your eyes open.

Sometimes the most valuable conclusion from a pre-interview visit is that you no longer want the job.

After each conversation, make brief notes while the discussion is still fresh. Record the person's role, the priorities they described, the problems they identified, planned developments, what they seemed to want from the new consultant and anything you need to investigate further.

Once you have completed your meetings, stop organising those notes by person and reorganise them by theme.

A simple framework is:

Area	What you need to understand
Organisation	Strategic priorities, values, major pressures and planned developments
Division	Performance, workforce, finance and service priorities
Department	Strengths, pressures, opportunities and future direction
Consultant team	Existing expertise, gaps, culture and succession needs
The post	Why it exists, what is expected and how it may evolve
Your contribution	Where your experience and interests genuinely match those needs

You have now converted a collection of conversations into something much more useful: an interview intelligence map.

Look at it and ask yourself which themes recur most strongly. Those themes should influence what you research further, which examples you prepare and which parts of your own experience you particularly need to be ready to discuss.

The pre-interview visit only achieves its full value if it changes the way you answer questions at interview.

Consider the common question: “Why do you want this job?”

A generic candidate might talk about the organisation's excellent reputation, their specialist interests and the opportunity to develop as a consultant. None of that is necessarily wrong, but almost any candidate could say it.

After a good pre-interview visit, you should be able to explain specifically what attracts you to the clinical work, the consultant team, the direction of the department and the organisation's future plans. You can then connect those features with your own experience and ambitions.

The same applies to: “What would you bring to the department?”

Do not simply recite your CV. Select the parts of your experience that address what you now understand the department needs. Perhaps your experience of pathway redesign is relevant to its capacity problem, your teaching portfolio fits an educational gap and your subspecialty expertise supports a planned clinical development.

A question about your first six or twelve months in post can similarly become more sophisticated. Rather than arriving as the heroic new consultant planning to transform the service immediately, you can talk about establishing relationships, delivering the clinical role reliably, understanding existing systems and data, listening to staff and patients, reviewing work already underway and then contributing to agreed priorities.

Your answers become grounded in their service, rather than generic consultant interview theory.

Our full guide to How to Prepare for an NHS Consultant Interview explores the wider process of predicting question themes, selecting examples, structuring answers, preparing presentations and rehearsing effectively. The information gathered during your pre-interview visits should feed directly into that preparation.

It is perfectly appropriate to refer to what you learned during your pre-interview conversations. In fact, doing so can demonstrate that you have taken the time to understand the organisation.

For example:

You can then explain how you would approach that challenge or how your previous experience may be relevant.

What you should avoid is excessive name-dropping. You do not need to repeatedly announce that you met the Medical Director, Chief Executive and every consultant in the department. Nor should you reveal anything somebody clearly told you in confidence.

Use the information to demonstrate understanding, not access.

Internal candidates should still go through this process.

You may already understand the clinical service extremely well, but that does not necessarily mean you understand the recruitment strategy behind the consultant vacancy. You may know relatively little about divisional priorities, future workforce plans, financial pressures or what senior leaders expect the new consultant to contribute.

Internal candidates can also make the mistake of assuming that the panel already knows them and their achievements. A formal consultant appointment is still a competitive recruitment process. Your experience needs to be articulated and connected explicitly with the requirements of the post.

External candidates should not assume that an internal candidate therefore has an insurmountable advantage. You bring a different perspective, potentially including experience of other systems and ways of working. A thorough pre-interview visit can give you enough local understanding to combine that outside perspective with a credible appreciation of the department.

A physical visit can be useful because it allows you to see the environment and meet several people relatively easily, but the real value comes from the conversations.

If distance, clinical commitments or a short recruitment timetable make an in-person visit impractical, arrange telephone or video meetings. You can still speak to the clinical lead, future consultant colleagues, managers and other relevant people and gather most of the information required for your interview preparation.

If you have been shortlisted with only a few days before interview, prioritise. A thoughtful conversation with the clinical lead, one or two prospective consultant colleagues and an appropriate operational or senior clinical leader will probably be more useful than spending your final two days desperately arranging meetings with everybody in the organisation.

It can be very useful to make contact with the department before submitting your application, although the purpose of a pre-shortlisting visit is quite different from the more extensive pre-interview visits you may undertake once you have actually been shortlisted.

At this stage, keep it focused on the department and the post. You do not need to start arranging meetings with the Medical Director, Chief Executive, Chair or a long list of senior managers. Your aim is much simpler: to decide whether the job is worth applying for and to understand what the department is really looking for.

The named contact in the advertisement, usually the clinical or departmental lead, is generally the best place to start. You might explore why the vacancy has arisen, how the post fits within the existing consultant team, what particular skills or interests they hope the successful candidate will bring and how they envisage the role developing. If appropriate, meeting one or two prospective consultant colleagues can also help you understand the department and the practical reality of the post.

This can make the job description and person specification much easier to interpret. A person specification may, for example, place particular emphasis on research, teaching, leadership or a specific clinical interest without explaining why. A conversation with the department may reveal that they are trying to replace the expertise of a retiring consultant, establish a new service, strengthen an academic programme or recruit somebody who could take on a future leadership role. You can then understand the angle behind the appointment, rather than treating every criterion as an isolated requirement.

That information can also help you complete the application form more effectively. You should never try to manufacture a profile simply because you think it is what the department wants, but you can choose which genuine parts of your experience deserve particular emphasis. If you now understand that educational development is a significant reason behind the appointment, for example, it makes sense to ensure that your relevant teaching experience is properly demonstrated rather than buried among less relevant achievements.

Pre-shortlisting contact is particularly useful for non-standard consultant posts. Some vacancies have a relatively obvious purpose and conventional job plan. Others combine specialties, contain unusual clinical responsibilities, involve substantial academic or leadership components, represent a newly created post or appear to have been designed around a particular service-development need. In these cases, the paperwork alone may not tell you enough to understand what the organisation is actually trying to recruit.

Not every NHS organisation or department will facilitate visits or conversations before shortlisting. Some may prefer to restrict contact at this stage or may simply not have the capacity to arrange it. It is still worth asking. A polite request to speak to the named departmental contact costs very little, and if they decline you have lost nothing.

The important distinction is therefore one of purpose and scale. Before shortlisting, stay close to the department: decide whether you want to apply, understand the thinking behind the vacancy and use that insight to interpret the person specification and prepare a stronger application. Once shortlisted, broaden your preparation and use conversations across the department and wider organisation to understand the strategic and operational context in which you would be working.

A brief thank-you message is reasonable where somebody has given you significant time or organised a visit, but you do not need an elaborate follow-up campaign.

Your real follow-up work is your interview preparation.

Go back through your notes and ask:

• What have I learned that I did not know from the job description?
• What themes appeared repeatedly?
• What does the department appear to need from its next consultant?
• Which parts of my experience are most relevant to those needs?
• What questions are now more likely to appear at interview?
• What do I need to research further?
• Has anything I learned changed how much I want the job?

You can then refine your preparation for questions around why you want the post, what you would bring, your first year as a consultant, service development, leadership, quality improvement, workforce and your vision for the department.

If the interview includes a presentation, the visit may also provide crucial context. A presentation entitled “My vision for the service”, for example, should look very different after you have spoken to the people actually running that service.

By the end of your pre-interview visits, you should know considerably more than you could ever learn from the job description alone. You should have a clearer understanding of why the post exists, what the department is trying to achieve, where its current pressures lie and what different people hope the new consultant will bring.

Now bring all of that information together. Look back at the job description and person specification in the light of what you have learned. Some of the criteria may suddenly make much more sense. Identify the themes that came up repeatedly, consider which are most likely to influence the interview and think about where your own experience genuinely fits.

This should help you decide which examples from your career are most relevant and which areas require further preparation. If service development was mentioned repeatedly, for example, you should be ready to discuss how you have approached change elsewhere and how you might contribute locally. If teaching, workforce, research or succession planning emerged as important themes, make sure you have thought about those areas properly rather than hoping you can construct an answer on the day.

The aim is not to predict the exact interview questions. It is to understand the post well enough that your answers make sense in the context of the department you are hoping to join. That is much more valuable than memorising model answers to dozens of generic consultant interview questions.

Once you have built this picture of the post, our guide to How to Prepare for an NHS Consultant Interview takes you through the next stage: deciding what to prepare, selecting your examples, anticipating likely question areas, preparing any presentation and rehearsing effectively.

A good NHS consultant pre-interview visit should change the way you prepare for the interview. Before your conversations, you largely have a job description and person specification. Afterwards, you should have a much richer picture of the department's strengths, pressures and ambitions, the people you would work with, the practical reality of the role and what colleagues hope their new consultant will contribute.

That understanding allows you to move beyond simply demonstrating that you meet the essential criteria. You can select the parts of your experience that are most relevant to the service, explain convincingly why this particular post appeals to you and give answers that recognise the opportunities and constraints facing the department.

Most importantly, the process should help you identify the intersection between what the organisation needs, what you genuinely offer and what you want from the next stage of your career.

If you are still some way from applying for consultant posts, start with Preparing for Your First NHS Consultant Post, which looks at building your consultant profile during the final stages of training.

If you have already been shortlisted, continue with How to Prepare for an NHS Consultant Interview for the wider process of researching the post, preparing likely question areas, selecting examples, planning presentations and rehearsing effectively.

The pre-interview visit sits between the two. It is where general preparation becomes preparation for this particular consultant job.