Examples & writing guide
GP CV example and writing guide
Updated 25 June 2026
A strong GP CV lets a reader find your clinical scope, career history and evidence of patient care without digging through dense prose. This guide provides a practical structure, a GP personal statement example and grounded advice for turning day-to-day work into credible evidence.
Examples by experience level
Newly qualified GP
TemplateBlue Horizon3 / 5
Why this works
The CV gives a clear picture of an early-career clinician through concise evidence of workload, patient care, administration and supervised training.
Continue writing your CVMid-level GP
TemplateGrey Frame5 / 5
Why this works
This GP CV sample shows a clear progression into general practice and backs clinical work, continuity care and service improvement with specific, defensible results.
Continue writing your CVSenior GP
TemplateTeal Signal2 / 5
Why this works
Shows clinical leadership, broad patient care and measurable improvements to access, prescribing and long-term condition reviews.
Continue writing your CVJunior vs senior: what changes
| Aspect | Junior | Senior |
|---|---|---|
| Personal statement | Lead with supervised clinical exposure, transferable evidence and the patient groups or consultation settings you have encountered. Keep the scope precise and do not imply responsibility you did not hold. | Open with the breadth of your generalist practice, leadership scope and a few defensible outcomes. Clarify whether your impact came through clinical work, service improvement, mentoring or practice-level responsibility. |
| Clinical experience | Give context for placements or early posts, then show how you gathered histories, examined patients, used investigations and contributed to diagnosis, treatment or referral decisions within your actual remit. | Compress routine duties and give more space to complex clinical judgement, long-term condition work, demand management and improvements delivered across a defined patient or practice population. |
| Consultation evidence | Show safe, clear communication through the consultation channels you have genuinely used. Modest, specific evidence is stronger than an unsupported claim that you handled every appointment type. | Demonstrate consistent delivery across in-person, telephone and online consultations, adding workload scale, service pressures and measured outcomes where records support them. |
| Practice operations | Mention triage, administration, medical reports, meetings, home visits or on-call work only to the extent that you performed them. Explain your contribution rather than inflating ownership. | Show how you managed or improved shared workloads such as triage, prescription requests, home visits, clinical administration, QOF work or local enhanced-service activity. |
| Collaboration and leadership | Use examples of effective handovers, meeting contributions and work with clinical or administrative colleagues. Focus on reliability, communication and how you acted on feedback. | Evidence leadership through defined teams, supervised colleagues, changed processes or coordinated multiprofessional care. State the scale and result instead of relying on leadership adjectives. |
| Metrics and outcomes | Use modest, verifiable measures such as a completed audit, number of records reviewed, turnaround time or attendance across a defined meeting programme. | Use broader measures such as practice-level completion, backlog reduction, service uptake or delivery against documented local targets, while keeping every figure traceable and confidential. |
How to write a GP CV
Use a clean, reverse-chronological format with clear headings and restrained styling. There is no useful universal page limit: give relevant clinical work enough room, but cut repetition and outdated detail that no longer supports the application. Put your name and contact details first, followed by your personal statement, clinical skills, employment history, education, professional standing and selected additional evidence. Do not include a photo or date of birth.
| Section | Include | Cut |
|---|---|---|
| Personal statement | Current level, clinical setting, relevant strengths and one or two evidenced results | Stock phrases such as "hard-working professional" |
| Skills | Capabilities demonstrated in recent posts | An unprioritised wall of keywords |
| Experience | Employer, title, dates, setting, scope, actions and outcomes | A copied job description |
| Education | Exact award, institution, completion status and date | Broad route descriptions presented as completed awards |
| Additional evidence | Relevant audit, teaching, research or service work | Unrelated material added to fill space |
Personal statement
Keep the opening paragraph short enough to scan quickly. State your career stage, the settings in which you have worked and the strengths most relevant to the vacancy. For a salaried GP post, you could draw on documented experience of clinical assessment and management, consultations through different channels, prescribing, triage or referrals. Choose only work you have actually done. A useful GP personal statement gives the reader a reason to continue; it does not squeeze the whole CV into five lines.
Employment history
List posts from newest to oldest. Under each one, provide enough context to make your contribution understandable: the type of service, the workload involved, your responsibility and the result. Keep routine duties brief. Give more space to changes you helped deliver, such as improving prescription-request handling, supporting appointment triage, completing clinical administration or contributing to service targets.
Numbers help only when they are accurate. Use counts, time periods, audit findings or turnaround measures that you can trace to an appropriate record. If you cannot support a percentage, describe the scope and result plainly. Never estimate a clinical outcome to make a bullet sound stronger.
Skills, education and additional evidence
Group related skills and put vacancy-relevant capabilities first. Support them elsewhere in the GP CV. Clinical judgement, first-contact care, management of long-term conditions, patient communication and multiprofessional working carry weight when your employment history shows where and how you used them. If your experience is primarily as a physician assistant, the physician assistant CV guide is a closer fit.
Record awarded qualifications exactly as they appear on your documents. Separate completed education, ongoing training and professional standing so that the reader cannot mistake one for another. Audit, teaching, research and professional development deserve space when they add relevant evidence; include dates, your role and a concise outcome.
Finish by comparing your GP CV with the vacancy line by line. Reuse its terminology only where it truthfully describes your background. Check clinical terms, dates and contact details, then follow the employer's requested file format. A GP CV template should improve navigation, not dictate claims that do not fit your record.
Personal statement examples
Patient-focused GP with seven years of experience in urban and mixed community practices, providing first-contact assessment, long-term condition reviews and consultations in person and by telephone. Confident in clinical decision making, prescribing and referral, with documented improvements to same-day triage flow and overdue medication-review completion. Offers calm patient communication, dependable clinical administration and a constructive approach to practice meetings.
I am a hard-working and caring GP looking for a new opportunity. I have good communication skills, work well alone or in a team and can perform all the usual duties. I would like to join a friendly practice where I can develop my career.
Writing your experience
Treat each bullet as evidence, not as a list of contractual duties. Begin with a precise action, explain the clinical or operational scope, and finish with the result. A reliable pattern is: action + patient group or service + change + defensible measure. Measures might include caseload, completion rate, turnaround time, access, audit findings or progress against an agreed service target. You do not need a percentage in every line; an accurate count or a clearly dated change is often more convincing.
| Duty-led wording | Evidence-led rewrite |
|---|---|
| Responsible for telephone consultations | Delivered an average of 28 telephone consultations per clinical day, recording same-day safety-netting and follow-up actions |
| Helped with repeat prescriptions | Reworked the prescription-request queue with administrative colleagues, reducing requests older than two working days from 46 to 14 in eight weeks |
| Took part in long-term condition clinics | Reviewed 210 patients during a six-month recall programme, reducing overdue reviews by 19% |
These are illustrative GP CV sample lines. Borrow the structure, never the figures. Use only information you are entitled to use, remove patient-identifiable details and be ready to explain how each measure was calculated. If the result belonged to a team, say so. "Worked with", "co-designed" and "contributed to" are more credible than claiming sole ownership.
Choose verbs that identify the work: assessed, examined, diagnosed, treated, referred, prescribed, reviewed, triaged, coordinated, audited, redesigned, supervised or taught. Avoid repeating "managed" when a more exact verb is available.
For a salaried post, prioritise evidence that matches the advertised clinical model. This may include history taking, examination, investigation, diagnosis, treatment and referral; in-person, telephone or online consultations; prescription requests; clinically indicated home visits; triage; clinical administration; or work with administrative colleagues in staff and clinical meetings. Keep the scope exact. One audit cycle is not permanent, practice-wide improvement.
More experienced applicants should show scale, influence and sustained clinical contribution. Name the size of the programme or team, the decision you owned and the measured result. Earlier-career applicants can use supervised work, rotations, audits and teaching, provided their level of responsibility is clear.
Key skills & ATS keywords
Hard skills
Soft skills
ATS keywords
Education & certifications
Keep this section factual and easy to verify. List each awarded qualification under its exact title, followed by the institution and completion year. Put ongoing study in a separate entry with an expected completion date. Do not turn a description of a training route into an award you have not received.
For the regulated UK route after GP training, GPs need to join the General Medical Council GP Register and apply to the General Medical Council for a licence to practise as a doctor. Give both items their exact names in a clearly labelled professional-standing section. Do not bury them in a skills list or imply that an application, incomplete stage or planned route is a status you already hold.
The Membership examination of the Royal College of General Practitioners (MRCGP) is taken before the end of GP training. Its stated components include the Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) and Clinical Skills Assessment (CSA). Where the MRCGP examinations have been passed and in-training Work-place Based Assessments (WPBAs) are satisfactory, a doctor completing GP training can apply for entry onto the General Medical Council GP Register. Present each completed or ongoing element separately, with its status and date, so the route is clear without overstating progress.
A doctor degree apprenticeship is an optional route into GP training. It takes around five years, is recognised by the General Medical Council and has employer-set entry requirements. Following that route, a candidate could progress to the foundation course of general training before completing specialist training in general practice. Record only the stages that form part of your own history.
The General Practice Academic Research Training Scheme (GPARTS) is an optional, fully funded, two-year supervised research-training scheme alongside GP training in Northern Ireland for trainees interested in general-practice or primary-care research. British Medical Association membership is also optional and may provide professional development and training opportunities. Neither should be presented as an entry requirement.
Common mistakes to avoid
AvoidListing consultation duties without showing the clinical decisions involved, such as assessment, investigation, diagnosis, treatment or referral.
InsteadConnect the presenting concern to your judgement and action. Add measures you can substantiate, such as consultation volume, audit completion or follow-up time, while protecting patient confidentiality.
AvoidWriting as though every consultation happens face to face.
InsteadShow how you work across the consultation channels you have used, including in-person, telephone or online appointments where relevant. Describe your approach to risk and the outcome rather than merely naming the channel.
AvoidTreating prescribing as a routine task without evidence of review or follow-through.
InsteadDescribe prescription request management through work you can substantiate, such as reviewing a defined workload, completing an audit or improving turnaround against a documented local measure.
AvoidLeaving triage, home visits, on-call work and clinical administration out because they appear less impressive than consultations.
InsteadInclude these responsibilities when they match the vacancy. State how you prioritised care, contributed to shared work or completed reports, supported by a clear scale or result where records allow.
AvoidUsing vague claims such as "excellent team player" without identifying the people involved or what changed.
InsteadName the clinical or administrative context, your contribution to meetings or coordinated care, and a defensible outcome such as a completed review, quicker handover or cleared backlog.
AvoidPacking the skills section with broad medical terms that have no supporting evidence elsewhere in the GP CV.
InsteadChoose skills that match your recent practice, then support the strongest ones in your personal statement and experience bullets. Include only figures, responsibilities and outcomes you can defend.
Frequently asked questions
Use the shortest length that covers relevant clinical work, role-specific qualifications, audit or improvement activity and recent development. Two pages is a sensible target for many applicants, although an experienced GP may need an extra page when every entry helps the reader assess the application.
Draw on supervised posts, placements, audits and transferable clinical work. State your level of responsibility precisely, then give examples of history taking, examination, clinical judgement, patient communication and collaboration that you genuinely performed.
No. Leave both off a British-style CV and use the space for relevant clinical evidence, role-specific qualifications and recent experience.
List each awarded role-specific qualification and completed training stage clearly, with the awarding body and date where applicable. Keep the sequence easy to follow, distinguish completed stages from work in progress and make sure it matches the evidence you can provide.
Use the vacancy's wording where it accurately reflects your experience. Relevant evidence can include consultations, clinical assessment and management, prescribing, triage, home visits, shared on-call work, clinical administration, meetings and contributions to local service targets.
Make the link clear by identifying transferable patient assessment, communication, prioritisation and referral work. Separate supervised exposure from responsibility you held independently, and explain briefly how your recent experience supports the move.
From example to application
Turn this GP example into a CV that sounds like you.
Keep the structure that works. Tailor the details around your experience, strengths, and the role you want.