Senior registrar

A Senior Registrar is a type of doctor in the United Kingdom or Ireland.

Senior Registrars (SRs) were medical (or dental) practitioners who were undertaking, or had completed, several years of higher level training in a hospital specialty or Public Health but had not yet gained a position as consultant (either by choice or because the competition was too stiff), thus differentiating them from the modern day Specialist registrars who are still completing training.

Usually, but not invariably, a higher qualification such as the membership or fellowship of one of the Royal Colleges and, in the more competitive specialties, several publications in peer-reviewed journals would have been obtained at the Senior House Officer or Registrar level, a short or long time before obtaining the Senior Registrar post.

As well as gaining clinical, teaching and administrative experience, SRs were expected to do research: usually clinical, but sometimes laboratory-based, even in clinical specialties. Several publications were expected. Some tried to obtain a higher degree: in earlier days normally an MD or ChM (or the local variant), but in later times a few aimed at a PhD (which involved more formal supervision) instead. Research for a PhD could be done part-time. Sometimes a higher degree would have been obtained before the SR appointment. This was also the most convenient stage for a minority of psychiatrists to undergo personal analysis as part of their psychotherapy training.

The numbers of these posts were limited, with the aim of roughly corresponding to the numbers of vacancies expected for Consultant or Senior Lecturer posts in the National Health Service or medical schools, so in many fields competition was more severe at the level of entry to the SR grade than for consultant posts.

Latterly Senior Registrars each had a National Training Number (NTN), which they relinquished on leaving training on obtaining a Certificate of Completion of Training (CCT): later changed to Certificate of Completion of Specialist Training (CCST) and now replaced by CT. Sometimes the same department would contain both registrars with higher qualifications waiting for a SR post and a senior registrar with NTN, who could be doing similar clinical work and research. In some other systems, such as that of Canada, there was no such externally imposed limit on trainee numbers.

Full-time academics (lecturers and some research fellows) could sometimes be upgraded from Honorary Registrar to Honorary Senior Registrar (with NTN) at an interview, without the open competition otherwise required.

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