← all questions · CV and cover letters
Depends entirely on the campaign. NSW takes no cover letter at all 1. Queensland folds the cover letter text into a four-page CV 2. SA scores CV and cover letter together at 10% 3. Victorian health services set their own — the Austin wants one page naming your stream 4.
Check the campaign before you write one. The NSW JMO campaign takes a resume, written responses to selection criteria at a thousand characters each, and explicitly no cover letter 1. Queensland's RMO and Registrar campaign wants the cover letter text inside a CV of four pages or fewer on its own template 2. South Australian adult BPT scores CV and cover letter together as a single 10% component 3. Victoria leaves it to each health service: the Austin's critical care HMO3 round asks for a one-page cover letter that states which stream you are applying for, and the Alfred asks for a cover letter plus CV plus three referees 4. Tasmania takes no selection-criteria statement for RMO jobs but asks registrar applicants for a cover letter about career goals 5. WA's rural surgical and physician pathways want a CV plus a two-page statement 6.
Where one is optional, it is a weak lever. A senior clinician who has held director of medical services and head of department roles says he never reads them and goes straight to the CV and the answers to the targeted questions 7. Another selector says the opposite — a letter or an email of interest makes you memorable when your name arrives in a spreadsheet of fifty 7. Both are describing the same reality: the letter changes nothing about your score and occasionally changes whether someone remembers you.
If you write one, make it specific. Use examples from your own clinical work and quote feedback you have actually received, rather than restating why you chose medicine 8. One page, addressed to the job in front of you.
The counter-argument nobody expected two years ago: selectors say they can tell when a cover letter was written by a chatbot, and they hold it against you 7. A plainer letter in your own words beats a polished generic one.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
I would so much rather a genuine CV than an AI CV. Ditto for cover letters. We can tell.
Some keen applicants send me an email detailing their interest in the role. Some will attach a cover letter. It makes them more memorable when I receive a long list of names in a spreadsheet later.
You should give examples from your own clinical experience, and quote feedback from consultants, colleagues, and patients you have gotten at your current job.
I have never bothered reading cover letters; it's generally bloated fluff that's a waste of time to read. I jump straight to the CV and the answers to the target questions for the role.
Asked 9 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /cover letter|covering letter/i. Quotes are the selectors' comments in the RMO campaign thread, deliberately including both the person who never reads cover letters and the person for whom they aid recall.