Doctor CV Examples & Writing Guide

A two-page short CV for an NHS consultant application or a locum consultant post, not a full academic CV. The name, hospitals and university are made up. The numbers (patients per post-take ward round, length of stay, readmissions, patient feedback) are the ones a clinical director will ask about, and your trust's information team can pull them for you.

Doctors in the UK keep two versions of their CV, and sending the wrong one slows you down. A full medical CV is a complete record with no page limit: education, training, registration, every audit, publication, presentation, committee and teaching role. A short CV is two or three pages, selected for one job, with numbers.

Keep both. Update the full CV whenever you add a qualification, course, audit or publication, then cut a short CV from it for each application.

Medical staffing or the agency screens for fit with the person specification and the pre-employment checks. The clinical director reads for clinical judgement and whether you will be a good colleague at 3 a.m. Write for both.

• Registration, stated plainly. "GMC full registration with a licence to practise; Specialist Register, Acute Internal Medicine, 2021", or "Specialty registrar ST7, CCT expected August 2027". A substantive consultant post needs Specialist Register entry, so do not leave the reader guessing.
• Licence and revalidation. One GMC licence to practise covers England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; there are no regional licences. Give your last revalidation year, and if you are coming from abroad, your registration route and any Skilled Worker visa sponsorship you need.
• Specialty and setting match. An acute medicine post wants take numbers and on-call pattern. A GP practice wants list size, sessions and procedures. A remote or telemedicine role wants the services and clinical systems you have used.
• Workload and outcomes. Patients per post-take ward round, beds covered, clinics per week, theatre lists, procedures. Then one or two quality numbers: readmissions, length of stay, national audit results, patient feedback.
• Gaps and moves. Any gap of more than 3 months since medical school will be asked about in pre-employment checks. Explain it in one line on the CV (parental leave, visa processing, a year out between training posts) instead of hoping nobody notices.

“The CVs that move fastest tell me the specialty, registration and Specialist Register status in the first three lines. Then I want workload and a couple of quality numbers. A nine-page CV for a district general hospital locum job means building that summary myself, and that puts the doctor a week behind everyone else.”

Use a personal statement, not a career objective, in almost every case: specialty and grade, registration, years and setting, one outcome. The exception is a doctor changing direction (into industry, into management, into a new specialty, or moving to the UK), where a one-line objective at the top of the personal statement tells the reader what you are applying for.

Most doctors' CVs list duties that every doctor in that specialty performs: "diagnosed and treated patients", "did ward rounds", "requested and interpreted investigations". A clinical director already knows you did that. Give the volume, the setting and the result.

A skills section on a doctor's CV is not a place for "compassion" and "critical thinking". It is a keyword block for the agency's or medical staffing team's search and a quick map of what you can do from day one. Group it in four or five lines.

• Clinical scope: the conditions and populations you manage most (sepsis, heart failure, high-risk obstetrics, paediatric asthma, frailty). Match the job description's wording.
• Procedures you are signed off for or logged in training: central lines, intubation, joint injections, colposcopy, skin excisions, point-of-care ultrasound. Locum agencies search these words directly for acute, remote and urgent care roles.
• Quality and systems: readmission reduction, length-of-stay management, mortality reviews, patient safety investigations, clinical audit, GIRFT or national audit work.
• Clinical systems and tools: Cerner (Oracle Health), Epic, System C, Nervecentre, ICE, EMIS Web and SystmOne in primary care, Dragon Medical One. Trusts plan induction around the systems they run; say which modules you have used.
• Teaching, committee roles, and languages you can take a history in without an interpreter (say "medical Spanish, conversational" if that is the honest level).

Medical staffing will check every line against your GMC record and references, so the order and wording matter. Put registration and qualifications in their own section directly after the personal statement or directly after experience, whichever the person specification emphasises. Use the exact names the issuing body uses.

1. 1Registration first: "GMC full registration with a licence to practise", then your register entry with specialty and year ("Specialist Register, Acute Internal Medicine, 2021" or "GP Register, 2019"). Registrars give the expected CCT date. Never write "on the Specialist Register" before the GMC has added you.
2. 2Revalidation: the year you last revalidated and, if you are moving, your current designated body. Your GMC number can go on the CV, since the register is public, or be offered on request.
3. 3Royal college membership and fellowship with the year: MRCP(UK), MRCS, FRCA, MRCPCH, MRCOG, FRCR and so on, plus a specialty certificate examination (SCE) where your specialty has one.
4. 4Life support certificates with the issuing body and expiry: ALS, ATLS, APLS, NLS, EPALS (Resuscitation Council UK for ALS, EPALS and NLS; the Royal College of Surgeons of England for ATLS; ALSG for APLS).
5. 5Education and training in reverse order: specialty training (programme, region, dates, CCT), core or internal medicine training, the Foundation Programme, then your medical degree (MBChB, MBBS, BM BCh) with year, plus an intercalated degree, prizes and distinctions.
6. 6For international medical graduates: your GMC registration route (PLAB 1 and 2, or an acceptable postgraduate qualification) and the year registration was granted, recent IELTS or OET results if the employer asks, and whether you need Skilled Worker visa sponsorship.

Your consultant job search usually starts in the final year of specialty training, before you are on the Specialist Register. Trusts know this and can interview registrars who are close to their CCT date. Show the timeline and make the training section carry the weight that a job would.

• State your CCT date and exams in the personal statement ("CCT in acute and general internal medicine expected August 2027; MRCP(UK) 2016, SCE in Acute Medicine passed 2024").
• Write specialty training like a job: programme, region, dates, and 4 to 5 bullets with numbers: procedures logged, patients on the take and in ICU, clinic numbers, QI project results, rota or trainee representative roles, teaching feedback.
• Locum work counts. If you did extra locum registrar shifts or worked as a clinical fellow during a year out, list it with shifts per month and patient volume.
• Research and publications: two or three lines with the citation, not a full list. Medical school: degree, school, year and prizes, with no exam marks or school results.

• Length depends on the job. A short CV for locum, agency and non-NHS roles is two pages; a full medical CV for consultant, training and academic applications is often four to six pages with audits, teaching and publications. One page is too short for a doctor.
• Order: header with qualifications after your name (Dr Priya Raman MBChB MRCP(UK)), personal statement, registration and qualifications, experience, education and training, skills, then optional sections (audit and QI, teaching, publications, presentations, management roles, memberships).
• Plain single-column layout, standard font, no photo, no date of birth, no marital status. Doctors who trained in countries where a photo and personal details are usual should take them off for UK applications.
• PDF named Lastname-Firstname-Doctor-CV.pdf. NHS posts go through NHS Jobs or Trac and agencies use their own systems; a plain PDF parses far better than a designed template.
• Mirror the job description's language once each where it is true: "acute medicine", "general internal medicine", "1 in 8 on call", "AMU", "SDEC", "Cerner", "Specialist Register", "Skilled Worker sponsorship", the place names. The cvplex ATS checker shows which of these are missing.
• Do not list referees on the CV unless the form asks. Medical staffing will ask for referees separately, usually including your current clinical or educational supervisor or clinical director.