General Surgery ST3 National Selection changes for 2024

Changes will be made to the national selection process for recruitment to ST3 General Surgery in 2024 to help improve the shortlisting process.

These changes are based on recommendations made following the independent review of medical selection made by the Work Psychology Group. There are no changes to the person specification.

Since 2020 national recruitment processes have encountered challenges around:

• a shortage of consultants volunteering to be interviewers
• process changes made to allow selection to be delivered at the start of the pandemic requiring review now the pandemic is over

Better communication of interviewer invitation and explicit support of Surgical Royal Colleges and Surgical Specialty Associations will address the first challenge. To address process challenges, ST3 National Recruitment Steering Group for General Surgery, the Joint Committee on Surgical Training (JCST), the Medical and Dental Recruitment and Selection (MDRS), and The Association of Surgeons in Training (ASiT) have agreed the following changes.

• Templates will be introduced for applicants to better evidence their portfolio requirements. This will allow better communication of the quality of key achievements, over quantity, via a more structured, equitable and detailed form.
• Self-assessment, introduced in the early days of the pandemic as a measure to allow delivery of selection 2020 is no longer required and will not be included in 2024 General Surgery recruitment. Portfolio assessment will be performed by consultant interviewers meeting in person to allow robust training and maximise consistency and quality. Shortlisting, if required by an excess of applicants over interview capacity, will be performed on the outcome of portfolio scoring.

Shortlisted candidates will be invited to virtual interviews between Tuesday 19 March to Thursday 21 March 2024.

For more information, please refer to the applicant guide which will be published on Oriel and the General Surgery ST3 pages on Wednesday 15 November. The application form will include the templates for evidencing portfolio requirements, all shortlisting questions and respective scoring details.