Specialist Advisor - General Medicine Consultant Doctors

Location: National
Daily rate: £300
Ad-Hoc: As and when required
Closing Date: Monday 5th May 2025 at 11.59pm

Are you committed to helping us regulate health and social care within England?
If so, we are looking for experienced General Medicine Consultant Doctors currently working in Professional Practice who can bring their knowledge in leadership and governance to rigorously assess organisational effectiveness at the highest level.

In this role, you would provide specialist advice and input into the Care Quality Commission's (CQC) regulatory inspection and investigation activity. This advice ensures that CQC's judgements are informed by up to date and credible clinical and professional knowledge and experience.

Please see below the specialism categories we are looking to recruit from a range of medical specialisms, including but not limited to:

1. General Internal Medicine
2. Acute Internal Medicine
3. Cardiology
4. Respiratory Medicine
5. Gastroenterology
6. Haematology
7. Care of the Elderly
8. Endocrinology
9. Neurology
10. Oncology
11. Palliative Care
12. Renal Medicine
13. Hepatology

When thinking about what drives you every day in your job, what keeps you motivated and passionate about your work, what comes to mind? For 3000+ people at the CQC we end each day knowing that we have made a difference to the lives of those most in need in our communities.

We make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, equitable, high-quality care and encourage services to improve. We are looking for people who are caring, demonstrate integrity, aspire to excellence, are committed to equitable and inclusive services and care, and work well as part of a team to join with us and share in this sense of achievement. If you would like to help us make a positive impact to health and social care within England and deliver a service of excellence to the public then read on.

Why this could be a great role for you
You will have an opportunity to contribute to ensuring that services and care provided to millions of people are safe, compassionate and effective. You will also collaborate with senior leaders to gain valuable insight into how organisations are assessed and be exposed to varying degrees of best practice.

The role of Specialist Advisor offers the opportunity for peer to peer learning in healthcare settings nationwide, as well as the chance to elevate transferable skills and expertise within clinical practice.

What you will bring

1. Be currently employed as a substantive consultant, or higher specialty trainee within a medical specialty. If you have additional experience in providing general internal medicine, please highlight this.
2. Have an understanding of clinical datasets, including national clinical audits and quality improvement projects.
3. Have personal experience in quality improvement and change management.
4. Possess an up-to-date appraisal in your local organisation and completion of mandatory training, including equality diversity and inclusion training.
5. Demonstrate strong communication skills and evidence of collaborative or multi-disciplinary working.
6. Have working knowledge of equality diversity and inclusion legislation and guidance relevant to health and social care providers.

Being a Specialist Advisor
Please note that all CQC Specialist Advisors are required to be substantively employed in active Professional Practice at a trust or provider, in a role aligned to the scope and specialisms of their work with CQC. If this role is within a clinical setting, it needs to include regular, clinical interactions with patients or service users monthly. For non-clinical professions, this should include direct work or direct line management of work with service users. Professional Practice does not include supportive areas, such as teaching, training or an advisory position.

This role can be undertaken as either a Casual Worker, paid directly to a personal bank account by the CQC for attending in your own time (non-working days, annual leave) or as a seconded position if your service is registered with the CQC and agrees to the secondment. Seconded SpAs' organisations agree in principle that their employees can attend CQC inspections and the seconded SpA seeks their line manager's permission to take leave to attend individual inspections, which can last from one to three days. The seconded SpA's organisation then invoices the CQC for the time the SpA spent away from their substantive role.

You will be offered opportunities to support inspection with 6 weeks' notice whenever possible, however, you will also be contacted for more short notice support on occasions. You are under no obligation to accept an inspection should it be offered and it not be convenient for you. And, we are not able to guarantee you a set number of inspection opportunities in a one year period. You may be offered one a month or one in the whole year depending on the focus of the inspection programme.

If successful at interview we aim to conclude your pre-engagement checks within a 12 week window, subject to you completing all the forms and taking actions to assist the team in achieving this. You will be provided with a dedicated onboarding peer who will support you in completing the pre-engagement checks and will be on hand to answer any questions you have. You will be required to have a current DBS certificate under 3 years old and we require references going back three years. If you've been with the same employer for three years' then we'll only require one reference.

Eligibility to work
If you are successful at interview, CQC will need to verify your right to work in the UK using digital identity verification. Details of how to complete the right to work check will be provided as part of the conditional offer of employment. If we are unable to verify your right to work digitally, we are required to complete this face to face at one of our CQC Offices. Please be aware that we are unable to progress any offer of employment until right to work in the UK is confirmed.

Professional Practice Definition:
Please note that all CQC Specialist Advisors are required to be substantively employed in active Professional Practice at a trust or provider, in a role aligned to the scope and specialisms of their work with CQC. If this role is within a clinical setting, it needs to include regular, clinical interactions with patients or service users monthly. For non-clinical professions, this should include direct work or direct line management of work with service users. Professional Practice does not include supportive areas, such as teaching, training or an advisory position.

To access the full Job Description, please click the link below:
Specialist Advisor Job Description

For an informal discussion or further information on the role, please contact Carolyn Jenkinson, Deputy Director of Secondary and Specialist Healthcare, at

Individual adjustments

We are committed to being open and transparent around our processes and we endeavour to offer every candidate the opportunity to perform at their best throughout the recruitment process. We seek to support candidates to identify potential challenges and work with them to identify and facilitate reasonable adjustments as appropriate. Should you require assistance and/or would like to request a reasonable adjustment at any stage of the recruitment process, please contact a member of the team via email:

CQC is committed to promoting a fair and inclusive workplace where all our people can flourish and reach their full potential. We know diverse teams allow for a more creative and productive environment and therefore encourage applications from everyone regardless of: age, gender/sex, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

Candidates must ensure that all information provided in their application is detailed in their own words and is factually accurate. Any examples provided must be taken from personal experience. CQC abides by honesty and integrity as part of its core values, if evidence of plagiarism or generating answers from other sources is found, applications may be withdrawn.

Our Values

Excellence - Meeting our challenge to be a high-performing organisation
Caring - Treating everyone with dignity and respect
Integrity - Demonstrating our passion for 'doing the right thing'
Teamwork - Enabling us to be the best we can