The Five Attributes the Oriel SJT Actually Scores

The Oriel Situational Judgement Test is blueprinted against the NHS England Professional Attributes Framework — not, as most revision advice assumes, the GPhC Standards for Pharmacy Professionals.

The framework describes ten attributes. The SJT scores five of them. Revising the other five does not move the number your rank is built from.

The five that are scored

• Person-Centred Care
• Communication & Consultation Skills
• Problem Solving, Clinical Analysis & Decision Making
• Multi-Professional Collaboration & Leadership
• Professional Integrity & Ethics

The five that are not

Self-directed Learning, Quality & Organisation, Personal Wellbeing, Adaptability, and Commitment to the Profession are all part of the framework and all matter to your development as a pharmacist. They are simply not what the SJT is scoring.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Two reasons.

First, it concentrates your preparation. Five attributes is a small enough set to know genuinely well — to recognise on sight, in a scenario, under time pressure. Ten is not, at least not to the same depth.

Second, Person-Centred Care is the first tie-breaker — see how Oriel breaks a tied score. After trial items, it is the very first thing consulted when two candidates finish level. If you are going to prepare one attribute more deliberately than the others, that is the one — and it is usually the one candidates treat as self-evident and skip.

"Clinical analysis" does not mean clinical knowledge

The third attribute is the one most often misread. Problem Solving, Clinical Analysis & Decision Making describes a reasoning process: what information to seek, who to escalate to, when to act and when to pause.

It does not mean the SJT tests pharmacology. A scenario may be set anywhere — community, hospital, general practice — and may name real medicines and conditions. But every option should be rankable on judgement alone. If placing an option correctly requires you to recall a specific clinical fact that the scenario has not given you, that is a flaw in the question, not a gap in your revision.

This is worth internalising, because it tells you what to do when you are stuck: reason about the behaviour, not the therapeutics.

How to revise against the framework

Read the framework itself rather than a summary of it, and read it for behaviours rather than wording. For each of the five scored attributes, ask what it would look like to demonstrate it well, adequately, and poorly in a workplace scenario. That three-way distinction is essentially what a ranking question asks you to perform.

Then practise. Recognition under time pressure is a different skill from understanding, and only one of them is trainable by reading — and you get two minutes a scenario.

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Dose Up's Oriel SJT bank is written against the five scored attributes, with every item traced to the attribute it tests. Try the free Oriel quiz.