The Aberdeen Medicine course

Teaching is organised by body system and builds your knowledge, skills and professional attitudes step by step. Science and medicine are taught together wherever possible. While you study the heart and lungs in year 1, for example, your lectures, anatomy practicals and clinical skills sessions all focus on those organs.

Year 1 opens with a term of groundwork on how the healthy body works, how disease develops, and how psychology, society and health systems affect health. Alongside it you start anatomy and clinical skills, including how to respond to medical emergencies. From term 2 you work through the body systems, finishing them all in year 3.

From term 2 of year 1, clinical cases act as a focus for the systems teaching. Each case starts with a trigger, usually a short patient scenario, followed by a set of questions, so lectures and practicals are tied to real patient examples. Medicine 1 includes directed self-study of cases, and year 4 has its own online cases. This is not problem-based learning (PBL), where group work on cases replaces most lectures.

The senior years work differently. Year 4 is organised as clinical blocks, with five themes running across them: diagnostics, end of life care, health data science, quality improvement, and the cost and value of healthcare. Year 5 moves on to professional practice, where you deal with the whole patient as part of the team.

Two strands run alongside the main teaching. Personal and Professional Development (PPD), which covers your professional behaviour and personal growth as a future doctor, starts in year 1. An optional GP Enhanced programme offers extra general practice and community sessions in every year for students who opt in.

Anatomy is taught and examined in years 1 to 3 as part of each body system. Year 1 opens with general anatomy, such as anatomical terms, bones and joints, muscles and nerves, and the back and spinal cord. You then follow the systems, from the lungs and heart in year 1 to the reproductive system in year 3.

Most teaching happens in the dissecting laboratories of the anatomy facility in the Suttie Centre. You learn from prosections: real human specimens already dissected by trained staff, so the structures are laid out for you to study rather than cut. Visiting surgeons, dentists and other doctors link what you see to clinical practice.

First you learn the rules of the Anatomy Act, the law governing the use of human bodies for teaching. Specimens are combined with models, X-rays, CT and MRI scans, 3D and video imaging, surface anatomy and histology, the study of tissue under the microscope. A 3D virtual anatomy system is also used in lectures, and the on-site Anatomy Museum, founded in the 1870s, holds skeletons, preserved specimens, models and anatomical art.

Anatomy is examined in an Objective Structured Practical Examination (OSPE), a practical test built around specimens and images. You sit one in every exam period in years 1 to 3 (Scottish universities call an exam period an exam diet).

Because core teaching uses prosections, you would not normally dissect. The school says some students get the chance to dissect individually, including a whole body, or to take on clinically focused dissection projects. The anatomy department's own pages link whole-body dissection to a year 3 Medical Humanities option it runs, Human Anatomy: Dissection with Historical, Cultural and Social Dimensions.

In the 2025-26 course catalogue, that option centres on a historical research project of your choice with an anatomical theme. It is backed by weekly history lectures, tutorials and library work, and includes a group presentation on a historical anatomical model.

Your first patient contact is in a controlled setting. From the start you practise examination on fellow students and Patient Partners, and rehearse consultations with simulated patients in the Clinical Skills Centre. Tutors and the Patient Partners themselves give you feedback.

Ward visits begin in term 2 of year 1 at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary: four short visits to a medical or surgical ward, starting with an orientation from the senior charge nurse who runs it. In debrief sessions afterwards you discuss what you saw and present patients you examined. GP tutors also bring patients into their surgeries for teaching.

In year 2 you go onto medical wards weekly for nine weeks. You also have sessions at the Royal Aberdeen Children's Hospital and Royal Cornhill Hospital, in medicine for the elderly, the emergency department, theatres and labs, and with nurse specialists, radiographers and physiotherapists. The aim is to show how the whole team shapes a patient's care.

Year 3 brings 26 ward sessions, where clinicians lead case-based discussions about investigations and treatment. You also return to the children's hospital and theatres, and visit infection prevention and control and surgical pre-assessment clinics. By the end of the year you should be able to do a complete head-to-toe examination, ready for full-time placements in years 4 and 5.

Assessment runs through all five years so that you master basic skills before moving on. Formative assessments are practice exams with no penalty: they give you feedback and help staff spot anyone who needs support. Summative assessments are the degree exams, usually at the end of the year, that decide whether you progress. You normally have two chances to pass them.

Written exams use single best answer (SBA) questions, where you choose the one best option from a list, as well as extended matching and short answer questions. Some courses also set essays, reports, posters or group presentations. OSCEs cover history taking, communication, examination, diagnosis, treatment and professional skills such as ethics.

In year 1, Foundations of Medicine ends with a 100-question SBA exam in December. Pass it and you skip that course's degree exam in May. Online self-assessments every few weeks, and compulsory 30-question practice papers in Foundations of Medicine, help you track your progress. To sit any degree exam you need a class certificate, which confirms you attended and did the required work.

Year 4 has two main exams, and you must pass both in the same academic year to start year 5. The written exam is the AKT, a computer-based SBA exam pitched at the level of a doctor in their first week of F1. It is a shared national exam set by the Medical Schools Council (MSC), which represents UK medical schools. As the GMC described it in 2024, it has two two-hour papers of 100 questions each, sat on consecutive days.

The second is an OSCE of nine eight-minute stations, spread over two days. According to the GMC's 2024 review, year 4 includes a practice (formative) OSCE as well as the real one, both set out like the final-year CPSA, so the format is familiar by then. In years 4 and 5, clinicians also rate your work with real patients in workplace-based assessments.

The CPSA is the year 5 OSCE, run as a sequential exam at a single purpose-built assessment centre. As the GMC described it in 2024, everyone sits 12 stations over two consecutive days, each eight minutes long with two minutes' reading time. Students who meet the standard stop there. The rest sit nine more stations two weeks later and must pass 14 of the 21 as well as an overall pass mark. There is no resit later that year: if you do not pass, you repeat year 5.

• SSCs are generally marked on a group report, a group presentation, an individual summary and peer marks for teamwork. SSC 3 also includes individual reports and a class test.
• When the GMC reviewed the CPSA in 2024, Patient Partners played the patients and, in stations with a patient, awarded 1.5 or 2 of the 30 marks for rapport, empathy and communication.
• Your year 4 OSCE result comes with personalised feedback on MyMBChB, the course's online learning system, normally within three working weeks of the examiners' meeting.
• Each year 4 block ends with a low-stakes review of your portfolio, graded above, meeting or below expectations rather than given a mark.
• Practical procedures, from giving oxygen to taking blood and inserting a urinary catheter, are signed off in a Clinical Procedural Skills Passport that you complete across years 4 and 5.

For the first three years you are based in Aberdeen, with ward attachments at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and other city hospitals, and GP teaching in practices across Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. Years 4 and 5 are spent in NHS Grampian and NHS Highland. The university also has NHS links for clinical attachments in Dumfries and Galloway, Fife, Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles.

Every student spends time outside Aberdeen. There are clinical campuses at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness and Dr Gray's Hospital in Elgin. At least one of your seven year 4 blocks is in Inverness, and at least one of your three final-year attachments is in Inverness or Elgin. Final-year attachments can go further still, to Stornoway, Fort William, Wick, Orkney or Shetland.

The Remote and Rural option is aimed at students who want to see healthcare in rural settings and may be interested in a rural career. If you are selected, you spend all of year 4 based at Raigmore Hospital, with visits to remote clinics and rural GP practices where possible. In final year, two of your three attachments are then in rural places such as Stornoway, Orkney or Shetland.

GP placements have their own spread. In year 4 the GP block is in a practice in or around Aberdeen, elsewhere in Grampian or in Fife, or near Inverness for practices run from there. In final year, GP placements range from Aberdeen city to Stornoway in the Western Isles, and from Shetland in the north to Stranraer in the south-west.

When a placement takes you away from Aberdeen, you keep your home base in the city and your accommodation at the distant placement is paid for. Remote and Rural students have accommodation supplied in Inverness and can choose to give up their Aberdeen accommodation while they are there. In years 3 and 4 many students live near Foresterhill, in shared flats or in Rosemount Hall of Residence.

SSCs are meant to build skills that lectures do not, such as self-directed learning, teamwork and managing your time, and to reward curiosity. Each one is described in its year above. In the Clinical Effectiveness SSC, a few groups each year have gone on to present their work at national conferences, send briefing papers to local clinical leads or submit it to journals.

The year 3 Medical Humanities SSC lasts six weeks. You can join a course alongside humanities honours students, take one designed for medical students, or propose an Alternative Project of your own. Some courses have no weekly lectures, so you work on your own initiative. Past students have produced art portfolios, photography and museum exhibits.

The 2025-26 catalogue lists options such as Creative Writing for Medical Students, Fine Arts and Medicine, Latin, Scots Language Awareness, Mandarin Chinese, Medicine and Economics, Human Factors and Patient Safety, and Sustainable Medicine. In Health Studies in Education you spend two weeks teaching in a secondary school and mentoring pupils who hope to study medicine.

The elective is a compulsory eight-week block in year 5, including travel. You pick the topic and an approved host in the north of Scotland, elsewhere in the UK or abroad, though the university may strongly advise against unsafe regions. The Committee of Advisors on Electives approves your research project in advance. You write it up as a 5,000-word report, which you must pass to graduate.

You arrange it yourself, helped by a local supervisor, a network of Electives Advisers and an electives website. Past projects include pain management on a hospital ship in Guinea, teaching children about malaria in Tanzania and mountain-biking injuries in New Zealand. Some students choose general practice topics supervised by GP staff, such as family planning.

Intercalating means taking a year out of the MBChB to earn an extra degree before returning to medicine. At Aberdeen it is optional. Most students who intercalate go after year 3, but going after year 4 is also possible. Third-year students get an information session in December or January.

The BSc (Hons) Medical Sciences (Honours Year) puts you in the final honours year alongside Medical Sciences students, in subjects such as pharmacology, physiology, neuroscience with psychology, immunology or genetics. After taught courses in the first half of the year, you do a 10-week research project, usually with a team at Foresterhill, and write it up as a scientific paper.

The BSc (Hons) Medical Sciences (Medical Humanities) is a year in the College of Arts and Social Sciences. It combines a research project and 10,000-word dissertation with three taught courses, at least two of them related to health or medicine, such as Medical Anthropology or Law and Medical Ethics.

An intercalated master's is open only once you have completed four years of the MBChB, or if you already hold a bachelor's degree. Options include a Masters in Public Health and MScs in Health Data Science, Clinical Pharmacology, Medical Imaging, Molecular Medicine and Human Nutrition, among others.

Outside intercalation, you can apply for the school's research scholarships. The Aberdeen Summer Research Scholarship Programme offers competitive eight-week summer research studentships, and endowed scholarships fund a 10-week paid project in medical science or neuroscience after year 2, 3 or 4. There is also a surgical scholarship called SurgAnat.

The Suttie Centre for Teaching and Learning in Healthcare, a joint project of the university and NHS Grampian, is the main teaching building at Foresterhill. It has floors given over to anatomy, MBChB teaching, NHS Grampian training and clinical skills.

Its Clinical Skills Centre has simulators for heart and lung examination and a recording system called SMOTS that films your history-taking for tutor feedback. There is also a simulation suite with patient manikins of varying realism, and a simulated ward where you practise looking after several patients at once.

You can also book practice rooms in groups of up to four, for an hour a week on weekdays or two hours at weekends. They are open 8am to 8pm on weekdays and 8am to 6pm at weekends, and contain a trolley bed, resuscitation manikins, an eye examination model, pelvic and pregnancy models and a neurology kit.

There is a Medical Library at Foresterhill, and the Sir Duncan Rice Library at King's College on the Old Aberdeen campus. In year 1 many students live in halls in or near Old Aberdeen, generally within a 30-minute walk of Foresterhill.

The school separates pastoral and academic support. For pastoral care, every medical student is given a Regent, a senior member of staff who meets you regularly throughout the course. Your Regent helps with personal problems and mentors your professional development, from spotting strengths and weaknesses to career advice and writing a CV. You first meet them in Freshers' Week or soon after.

Academic support comes from the Year Lead teams and from the staff who teach each part of the course. If you do badly in a formative assessment, you are invited to an advisory interview to talk it through and get advice.

A Student Support Lead is the first contact for worries such as leaving home, family, money, health or falling behind, and finds the right help if they cannot solve a problem themselves. The MBChB Support Service, run by senior academic staff with an NHS Grampian consultant psychiatrist, helps you understand your difficulties and treatment options and can arrange referral to specialist mental health services.

Through the Student Pairing Scheme, every first-year student is paired with two second-year students who act as informal parents and pass on advice from their own experience. A member of MBChB staff also has a specific remit for careers guidance.