CESR Application Guidance: General Surgery

If you fail to include any of the following you will be unlikely to make a successful CESR application in General Surgery.

When applying please also see the SSG, JCST ‘guidance for applicants’ and the General Surgery curriculum.

Knowledge

• the intercollegiate FRCS^[1].

Skills and experience

• declare an area of special interest, as set out in the curriculum
• provide logbook and consolidation sheets set out in the elogbook format.
• minimum of 1600 cases in logbooks
• fulfill indicative numbers for general surgery and subspecialty
• 3 PBAs for each general surgery indicative and subspecialty procedure. These should be completed by 3 different assessors. It is very important that your PBAs are as meaningful as possible and therefore they should show evidence of feedback and guidance. They should include comments from your assessors and, where appropriate, demonstrate reflection by you. Block entries of ‘satisfactory’ are not acceptable
• 10 CBDs for each of emergency general surgery, specialist interest and other area of general surgery (30 CBDs in total)

Papers and Presentations

• 3 peer-reviewed papers (not case reports)
• 3 first-author presentations at regional/national meetings

Courses

• management in the NHS
• training the trainers
• up to date ATLS

Audit

• primary evidence of 3 audits and at least one audit cycle to have been completed

Structured references

• an applicant must provide 6 references, one of which is from their current clinical director

Guidance links

• Specialist Specific Guidance
• JCST Guidance for Applicants

[1] As this is the equivalence route then it is possible that you can demonstrate this in other ways. The specialty specific guidance on the GMC’s and the JCST’s website give details. It is however, highly unlikely, that any combination of evidence other than the intercollegiate examination will show exact equivalence.