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 2026 recruitment

The Person specification for General Surgery ST3 remains unchanged except for the GMC registration requirement and the update about the CRESHT form which is now the “Alternative Certificate of Eligibility to Enter Higher Surgical Training” form as outlined below and on the Person specification.

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

The evidence upload window (for the checklist, templates and associated evidence) remains in place to allow candidates to gather evidence and have the templates countersigned and this will now be done via the Qpercom Evidence Portal.

The candidates’ application and associated evidence will be used to shortlist candidates for an 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:

1. Applicants should familiarise themselves with the generic changes to medical specialty recruitment published by NHS England In particular: Applicants to 2026 specialty recruitment will now need to be fully registered with the General Medical Council (GMC) at the point of application
2. Completed templates and supporting evidence must be reviewed and certified as true and accurate by the candidate’s Educational Supervisor (or equivalent) as in previous years

However, to reduce the number of signatures required, from 2026 the cover sheet “Shortlisting Evidence Applicant and Educational Supervisor Checklist” must be completed and uploaded by each applicant, to the Qpercom Evidence Portal.

Please note: it is mandatory to upload this completed checklist and we require a signature against each question.

The checklist includes the following statement(s):

Applicants, verifiers and shortlisting panel members should note that each logbook page, including cover sheets where applicable (supporting evidence for question/template 2) must also be individually verified with a legible ES name, signature and GMC (or equivalent) number, or the application will be rejected.

When reviewing and verifying logbook evidence, please ensure this is congruent with the applicant’s employment history. If the applicant has undertaken General Surgery posts where logbook evidence appears to have been either exaggerated or omitted in order to increase their points score in that domain, a score of 1 point will be awarded instead.

3. Applicants must upload one merged PDF document per question, containing both the template and all supporting evidence relevant to that question. This approach helps the consultant to review the evidence efficiently and avoids confusion about how points should be awarded

Failure to follow this guidance may result in your evidence not being reviewed/or your application being withdrawn from the process.

4. Each application will be scored at shortlisting by an individual consultant in the first instance. However, in event of a “high-stakes” decision, for example, one which would result in withdrawal of the application, second independent agreement from a clinical lead will be required
5. Contingency for lack of availability of shortlisting panel members: 

We reserve the right to reduce the volume of applicant evidence assessed at shortlisting in the event of a significant shortage of shortlisting panel members caused by unforeseen circumstances. We would notify applicants of any change to the process in advance of the shortlisting process.

We advise applicants to upload their 2 presentations and publications in priority order so that the items uploaded as item 1 in each category would be the ones that would be considered in the event that this contingency was required.

6. Evidence in the Audits domain is reduced to a single closed-loop audit from the previous 3 in response to feedback from previous recruitment rounds. Applicants should also note that very generic audits are no longer accepted, for example, (Mandatory) Trust Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) audits, antibiotic prescribing compliance, simple casenote/operation note audits, as these are felt to have low/no value in discriminating between the best applicants for ST3. This is current practice in other specialties. for example, Ear, nose and throat (ENT)
7. Marks for audits which are no longer required have been redistributed to other domains, increasing the relative weighting for experience in general surgery and for operative experience, reflecting the importance of these domains

A proportion of the marks available for redistribution will also contribute to a global score for the presentation of the shortlisting evidence (score range 0-5). This is consistent with both the general surgery interview stage, and with other surgical specialties (for example, Trauma and Orthopaedics (T and O). Global scores will also form the initial “tie-break” in the event of tied scores.

8. Increase in the minimum number of index operative procedures required. Previously applicants were required to have completed 6 or more appendectomy at Supervised Trainer Scrubbed (STS) or above. From 2026 this has been increased to 10 minimum, with the justification that Covid's impact on access to opportunities to operate is diminished as training activity recovers, which should be reflected in an increase in applicant operative experience
9. There are a small number of iterative changes to the score distribution/descriptors within some domains as a result of feedback on descriptor performance from previous rounds. For example, Presentations domain now excludes regional meetings (in line with other specialties, for example, Trauma and Orthopaedics (T and O, Plastics, Vascular), and as there is no distinction between national/international meetings the marks/descriptor for meeting level becomes redundant. That mark is reallocated to a descriptor of the quality of the work (not scored 2025 round) to be congruent with audit scoring descriptors. Type of presentation will no longer distinguish between some types of presentation which are not felt to be of relevance to the quality of the work (for example, oral vs orally presented poster vs poster)
10. Statement regarding the use of Artificial Intelligence during remote interviews:

The four nation Postgraduate National Recruitment Programme Board has issued a position statement on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) during interviews for postgraduate training programmes, including medical specialty training. Applicants should carefully review this, particularly noting the statement "Any applicant who is found to be using AI or other automated technologies during the interview will be disqualified from the recruitment process and may be referred to the relevant professional or regulatory body."