Frequently asked questions

Yes — the GMC replaced CESR/CEGPR with the Portfolio Pathway on 30 November 2023. Same goal: specialist registration for doctors who didn't complete a UK training programme, evidenced through a portfolio mapped to your specialty's curriculum. Most people still say CESR; we support the current Portfolio Pathway process.

No, and that's deliberate. You upload your bundle to GMC Online yourself — the export includes a click-by-click walkthrough so that takes an afternoon, not a week. The declarations you make to the GMC stay yours, as they must.

Your documents are stored encrypted in London (UK data residency) and are only ever processed to organise your application. We never train AI models on your data, never sell it, and deleting your account erases everything within 30 days. Full details are in our privacy policy.

GMC rules require evidence to be anonymised — and if a document contains patient-identifiable data, the GMC deletes the whole file, not just the offending line. That single deletion can leave a section of your portfolio unevidenced, which is one of the most common reasons applications come back as incomplete or inadequate. CESieR screens every page it can read for patient-identifiable data — NHS numbers, dates of birth, names in clinical context — and blocks any document where it finds something from your export until you've redacted and re-uploaded it. It tells you what it found rather than declaring a file clean: there is a limit to how much of one file we can read, we name the pages we didn't reach, and scans are read by OCR, which misreads. Your first 15 documents are screened free, so you can see exactly what the screen does on your own evidence before paying for anything; past 15, a £20 screening pass covers every document after that, on this application and any other you start. What the screen finds is never behind the paywall — the findings and the fixes are always yours to see, because that part is a safety feature, not a sales one.

Because the judgement, the declaration and the documents all have to stay yours. Whether a detail identifies a patient is a judgement in context — your own name on a certificate is fine, while a rare condition plus a date plus a ward can identify a patient whose name appears nowhere on the page — and an AI screen, however useful, misreads scans and misses things. If we rewrote your files automatically, every miss would become invisible to you at exactly the moment you sign the GMC's anonymisation declaration about them. There is a probity dimension too: evidence a third party has edited is evidence whose authenticity can be questioned, so we never alter a file you upload. Where a finding is a third party's name, we do offer a one-click redaction — but it writes a separate derived copy with the affected pages flattened to pixels, so nothing stays selectable underneath a black box; your original is untouched, the step is reversible, and any name we cannot locate precisely stays flagged rather than guessed at. Doing the whole job for you would also mean extracting and keeping what we believe is patient data — and we are deliberately built the other way: the identifying text behind a finding is never stored on our servers, only a masked fragment of its surroundings. So the screen finds, names the page, and blocks the document from your export until you have dealt with it. The redaction, like the declaration, stays yours.

Every suggestion comes with the reasoning and a confidence score, and nothing enters your portfolio until you confirm it. Think of CESieR as a very fast registrar who's read all your documents and made a first pass — you remain the consultant who signs it off. Your specialty specific guidance on the GMC website is always the authoritative source.

We're building towards every current GMC Portfolio-pathway specialty — each one a curated template mapped from its official specialty specific guidance. Dozens are already live across medicine, surgery, psychiatry, pathology, radiology, anaesthetics, paediatrics, obstetrics and gynaecology, general practice and more, and we're steadily adding the rest. On the Start a new application screen, search the picker by specialty or by college (for example RCPCH or JCST) to see what's available today. If yours isn't there yet, tell us and we'll prioritise it: hello@cesier.uk.

No, and be wary of anything that claims otherwise. The Royal College evaluators judge the quality and completeness of your evidence. What CESieR does is make sure nothing fails for organisational reasons: evidence in the wrong section, missed gaps, out-of-date documents, missing verifiers, or anonymisation failures.

Uploading is free, and so are your first 15 documents — read, processed, screened and counted into your gaps. That is the real product on your own archive, not a demo, and it is meant to be enough to judge us by. Past 15, a £20 screening pass covers every document after that — and it follows you, not the application, because anonymisation screening is the same check whatever specialty you are applying for. One payment, no expiry, and it does not include the mapping report. The full mapping report — every document matched to your portfolio sections with the reasoning and a confidence score, your section-by-section coverage map, and the full gap report (missing sections, out-of-date evidence, missing verifiers) — is £99. The Application Pass — export bundle, upload walkthrough, description drafting, re-exports until you submit — is £499, with your £99 credited in full. Prices include VAT. No subscription.

Add the new documents, re-map, and re-export — the Application Pass covers re-exports until your application is decided, at no extra cost.

We detect non-English documents and flag where the GMC will require certified translations. The upload walkthrough itself comes in English plus an optional automatic translation into a language of your choice — though note the GMC portal itself is in English.