Top Pediatrician Interview Questions

A pediatrician has a crucial role to play in the life of a child. From examining the minute health conditions that could give rise to a more significant disorder, a pediatrician does it all to diagnose a sick child’s diseases. A healthy life is the utmost priority of a parent, and it depends a lot on the pediatrician.

So, it is evident that a parent would want to choose the best pediatrician for their child, or a hospital would want the topmost doctor for their child care department to treat their patients. Impressing a parent, though, is difficult but not impossible. Hitting an appropriate answer to a twisted question is what will help you achieve the position.

This set of questions can be of your help.

What is your medical certification as a pediatrician?

Your certificates and qualifications will at first judge your credibility in handling a patient. Obviously, how else can an interviewer judge a doctor? You should never be brief in this area. Always be at your most confident self and speak in detail about your qualification.

An MBBS and an MD degree are what makes you eligible for the role of a pediatrician. But additional certification will enable you to get established as a well-qualified pediatrician. So, make sure you include those certifications while presenting your answer.

But no other certificate is more valuable than your own experience of handling a case. Refer to some of your brave cases to bag the deal.

What will you do in case of an emergency out of your office hours?

Emergency does not come after knocking on the door. It can be any hour of the day when you might get a call about a crisis. There might also be cases where it is not an emergency, but the parents are paranoid about the child’s littlest cough. A question like this may be asked about your response to an emergency call out of your office hours.

Answering this question is the easiest. As a doctor, you can reply while taking the oath to serve humanity. You promised that nothing and not even your own life would be more important to you than saving a patient. So, no matter what time it is, you will be at the service of the ill and do your best to recover him from his sickness.

But do remember to tell them that every effort has its value to be paid. So, when you run at any hour of the day to treat a patient, you do expect a nominal increase of your fees than usual from the parents.

What action will you take in case a child is not at all cooperating with you?

It is a typical case where a child is anxious about visiting the doctor. When your interviewer asks this question to you, please take full advantage of it. Generally, children like to be in their comfort zone while they are ill. Parents do not take them to a doctor in the best health so, they develop this idea that the doctor may harm them or cause them pain. And many children are there who are afraid of the injections. They know doctors will be pushing them if they detect an illness. So they prefer keeping their mouth shut.

You can answer the interviewer that, in such a condition, you can try to comfort the child and his parents as children develop the idea unconsciously from their parents only. They see their parents becoming cautious before visiting a doctor, and they do the same thing too.

When the child sees that his parents are laughing and are not overcautious, they automatically will start cooperating with the doctor. However, introverted children are an exception.

Suppose two equally emergency cases have landed at the same time. What will you do?

One of the most important and tricky questions to be answered during an interview session is your action when multiple emergency cases arise. As a parent, everyone will want their child to be treated first, no matter how emergency the other cases are. But you have to answer from the perspective of a rational doctor.

Tell the interviewer that you will take the help of your most trusted assistant at that moment and handle both the emergency cases side by side. However, after a quick checkup, you will pay more attention to the more critical case and needs your attention the most.

Also, do refer to your earlier experiences in multitasking, if you have any.

What might be why a baby’s health is excellent, but she would not stop crying?

There are ample cases where even the doctor gets confused about why the baby is crying without illness. So, asking a question like this is not unusual. The reply you can give is, there are a lot of reasons for a baby to be cranky without having any health hazard.

First of all, she might not have received proper sleep, which has fatigued her to the extent that she would not stop crying. Secondly, A baby remains inside the womb for nine months, so accustoming to the temperature may bring her mood swings.

Thirdly, there might be a problem with breast milk. A lot of times, the mother eats something bitter that changes the taste of the breastmilk too. The child may not like the taste of it and is crying for that reason. At the first diagnosis, the doctor can detect these reasons behind her nonstop crying. After later on, a thorough checkup must be prescribed to examine if she has any disease growing inside her body.

Conclusion

There are a thousand more varieties of questions that an interviewer can ask a pediatrician. But these are the most common ones that generally are present in the questionnaire of every interview. If you have a standard grade in your degree, answering these questions should be enough for you to get the job—best of luck.