Overview of General Surgery

An overview of General Surgery ST3.

These pages aim to provide you with information regarding all aspects of the nationally coordinated General Surgery recruitment in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

You must read all of these pages and the guidance on the Medical Specialty Recruitment pages before beginning your application.

General information regarding recruitment to all specialty training posts is available on the Medical Specialty Recruitment pages.

Summary of 2025 recruitment

The Person Specification for ST3 General Surgery remains unchanged. 

Candidates will fill in an application form on Oriel which will clearly outline the evidence required for each domain using templates with very clear instructions for additional evidence (where relevant). 

The evidence upload window (for templates and associated evidence) remains in place to allow candidates to gather evidence and have the templates countersigned. 

The candidates’ portfolios and associated evidence will be used to shortlist candidates for a 40 minute interview assessing a clinical scenario, a management scenario, and a discussion of their career to date.

Eligible applicants will be invited to book an interview slot via their Oriel account following shortlisting. 

The scores from shortlisting will be added to the interview scores and will therefore continue to form part of the overall candidate score. The final total score will be used for ranking and job offers. 

Key points in relation to previous recruitment round

Questions are unchanged from the previous round.

Candidates do not self-assess their portfolio.

The emphasis in scoring the portfolio will be on quality not quantity. All portfolios will be scored by a panel of consultants.

Each portfolio will be scored by a pair of consultants and discrepancies addressed to provide a robust score.

Applications do not require large volumes of unstructured evidence.

Each question on the application form will be underpinned by a template on which candidates will be asked structured questions about the domain of the question. Applicants must ensure that all sections of the template are completed for each question.

Each completed template must be certified as true and accurate and be countersigned by the candidate’s Educational Supervisor (or equivalent) to include the supervisor’s name, GMC number (or equivalent) and signature (typed names as signatures will not be accepted). Each template will be uploaded by the candidate during the evidence upload window.

Educational and leadership experience will continue to be assessed in Portfolio interview.