FP & AFP Points

In your final year, you’re going to have to apply to the foundation programme to secure F1/F2 jobs. Traditionally there are 2 main routes: “Normal” Foundation Programme (FP) and Academic Foundation Programme (AFP), with more recent additions of Priority Foundation and Psychology Fellowships.

For the Foundation Programme (FP), briefly, the system works by asking you to rank areas in the country you want to work in (locations are termed deaneries). Once you’ve been allocated a location (deanery) then you rank all the jobs within the location. The person with the highest points will get that spot. You can get a maximum of 100 points for this. 50 of which comes from the Situational Judgement Test (SJT) and the remaining 50 is broken down into: medical school decile score (maximum 43 points; i.e. 1st decile (top 10%) get 43 points, 2nd decile gets 42, 3rd get 41 etc.); extra degrees (maximum 5 points; i.e. 5 for a PhD, 4 for a first in your intercalation year, 3 for 2:1 etc.), that leaves us with the final 2 points of the maximum 50. These magic points come from PUBLICATIONS. 1 publication (in a peer-reviewed journal with a PubMed ID) = 1 point and you can have a maximum of 2. So grab 2 publications and you are set and no need to bother with anymore right? Click for the Application Score and Educational Performance Measure (EPM) infographics.

Wellll, not quite. If you are looking to apply to the Academic Foundation Programme (AFP) then up to 10 publications (2 points each), 10 presentations/posters (1 point each) and 5 awards/prizes (1 point each) are recognised. For London AFPs, the sneaky rule is that only decile 1-3 and people with more than 10 points from publications, presentations and prizes are picked for interview. Click for the AFP Score infographic.

So to summarise, publications, presentations and prizes translate to meaningful points for applications both foundation and even higher up. For example, for the surgical training pathway, presentations and publications make up 5 points out of a possible 35, with other categories including audit, teaching, commitment to specialty, clinical experience.