Home Palliative Medicine Physician Resume template
Palliative Medicine Physician resume template
A clean starting structure with example content grounded in what palliative medicine physicians actually do day to day, not generic filler. Download and replace the bracketed placeholders with your own details.
Which resume format should you use?
Reverse chronological
You have a steady work history. This is the format almost every recruiter and ATS expects by default.
Functional
You're changing fields or have gaps in your employment. Leads with skills rather than a job-by-job timeline.
Combination
You're early career or have worked consistently but for only a few employers. Blends a skills summary with a shorter chronological history.
This template uses the reverse chronological format: the one most palliative medicine physicians should default to, since most Australian recruiters and ATS software expect it.
Professional summary
Palliative Medicine Physician with fellowship training through the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, working across inpatient, hospice and community settings. Focused on complex symptom control, clear goals of care conversations and supporting families through decisions that are rarely straightforward. Comfortable leading multidisciplinary teams and teaching the next group of registrars coming through the rotation.
Key skills
- Complex pain and symptom assessment, including opioid titration and rotation
- Advance care planning and goals of care discussions with patients and families
- Multidisciplinary care planning with nursing, allied health, social work and spiritual care
- Prescribing and monitoring of opioids, adjuvant analgesics and palliative sedation
- Subcutaneous syringe drivers and infusion pumps
- Electronic medical records such as PowerChart or eMR
- eMIMS and state palliative care prescribing guidelines
- Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration (PCOC) assessment tools
- Telehealth consultation for community and rural patients
- Supervision, teaching and feedback for registrars and junior doctors
- Written communication, including letters to GPs, aged care and community providers
- Family meetings and conflict navigation around prognosis and preferred place of care
Experience: example bullet points
- Managed complex cancer and non-cancer pain on an inpatient palliative care unit, rotating opioids and adding adjuvant agents where response was poor, which cut unscheduled after-hours reviews noticeably
- Led weekly multidisciplinary meetings with nursing, allied health, social work and spiritual care, with documented goals of care completed for every patient on the active caseload
- Ran family case conferences covering prognosis, ceilings of treatment and advance care planning, supporting patients to record a preferred place of care and have it respected
- Supervised registrars and junior doctors on rotation, running bedside teaching and practical sessions on syringe driver setup, breakthrough dosing and end of life prescribing
- Embedded PCOC symptom assessment into routine ward rounds so symptom scores were collected consistently across shifts and handover
- Provided telehealth follow-up for community patients in regional areas, reducing travel to outpatient appointments for people in the last months of life
- Worked with residential aged care staff on end of life prescribing and escalation planning, improving confidence in managing symptoms overnight
Education
Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery or equivalent, prevocational hospital training, then Royal Australasian College of Physicians advanced training in palliative medicine and fellowship (FRACP).
Keywords an ATS is likely to scan for
Applicant tracking systems match your resume against terms in the job ad before a person ever sees it. Only include the ones that actually apply to your experience, but if a term below matches something you've done, use the same wording the job ad uses.
- AHPRA specialist registration
- Royal Australasian College of Physicians
- FRACP
- palliative medicine advanced training
- advance care planning
- goals of care
- National Palliative Care Standards
- PCOC
- eMIMS
- opioid prescribing
- palliative sedation
- subcutaneous syringe driver
- multidisciplinary team
- ELDAC
- residential aged care
- telehealth
- continuing professional development
- hospital eMR
Getting past ATS screening
- Match the specific skills, certifications and terms used in the job ad, not just your own wording for the same thing.
- Keep formatting simple: no tables, text boxes, columns, headers/footers or graphics. Parsers frequently drop content placed in these.
- Submit as .docx or PDF unless the job ad specifies otherwise.
- Use standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills) rather than creative alternatives.
- List your core skills and technical competencies in their own section so a keyword scan can find them instantly.
This is a starting point, not a guarantee of interviews. Tailor every bullet point to your own real experience and the specific job ad.