The Anglia Ruskin (ARU) Medicine course

The General Medical Council (GMC), which regulates doctors and approves medical degrees, sets the outcomes every UK medical graduate must reach, and ARU's curriculum is built to cover them. The course runs in three phases. Phase 1 lays down the principles of medicine through the respiratory, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems. Phase 2 works through the remaining body systems across Years 2 and 3. Phase 3 is the clinical phase, moving through rotations to a foundation assistantship, where you work alongside newly qualified doctors.

You learn in lectures, in labs and on placement. Early on, campus teaching and placements are paired. The Year 1 hospital afternoons happen during the system block you are studying, so you use the skills from campus with real patients during that block.

The balance shifts as you go. In Years 1 to 3 you combine campus teaching with GP days, hospital sessions and a block placement at the end of each year. By Years 4 and 5 you are in hospitals or general practice almost all the time, with simulation teaching on campus supplementing what you learn on the wards.

Some subjects run through all five years as longitudinal themes instead of having a block of their own. These include anatomy and physiology, public health, palliative care and microbiology. Professionalism, ethics and evidence-based medicine are also themes, because every doctor needs them at every stage. In 2024 ARU told the GMC it had introduced a new professionalism syllabus and appointed a Professionalism Support Lead.

You also learn alongside other health professions. At the GMC's 2022/23 visit, the school described Year 5 opportunities to work with district nurses and other professionals, and teaching scenarios shared across professions. It was also building case scenarios on physical and mental health with ARU's nursing and physician associate courses. Physician associates diagnose and treat patients under a doctor's supervision.

Anatomy at ARU is taught through dissection. You learn it by dissecting the bodies of people who donated them to medical science, and anatomy tutors and technicians run the sessions. The bodies are Thiel-embalmed, a soft method of preservation that keeps tissue more flexible and lifelike than traditional embalming.

The Anatomy Centre sits inside the School of Medicine. It has a large dissection room with ceiling-mounted computer screens and its own embalming facilities. Alongside the donor bodies you use radiology software, a virtual dissector, 3D-printed models made from CT scans and ultrasound machines.

Anatomy is a longitudinal theme, so you keep returning to it throughout the five years rather than finishing it in Year 1. The theme has its own lead, an anatomy lecturer who also teaches histology (tissues under the microscope) and embryology (how the body develops) and runs dissection sessions. Your anatomy knowledge is tested in anatomy spot examinations.

ARU puts you on clinical placement from your first term. In Year 1 you are allocated to one hospital trust and attend in a small group one afternoon a week, for five weeks during each of the respiratory, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal blocks. The aim is to use the basic clinical skills you learn on campus with real patients.

On those afternoons you practise taking a history, which means asking a patient about their symptoms and background, and examining patients. You also try basic procedures such as respiratory function tests, which measure how well the lungs work, and recording and interpreting a 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG), the standard tracing of the heart's electrical activity.

You spend five full days in a GP practice in Year 1. The patients may be people coming to ordinary surgeries, or expert patients who live with a condition and attend specifically to help teach students. You may also work with practice nurses, observe clinics and minor surgery, see pharmacy, reception and administration, and go on home visits with a GP.

At the end of Year 1 an integration block of hospital placements takes you into general medicine and general surgery. That can mean wards, admissions and observation units, clinics, emergency departments or operating theatres. From there contact keeps building until, in Years 4 and 5, you are in hospitals or general practice almost full time.

You are assessed through exams at the end of each year and a portfolio built up across the course. You need to pass each element of a year to progress. When the GMC checked ARU's final written exam in 2024, the school's rules allowed one resit in the same academic year. A student who failed the resit could repeat the whole year, but only once and only if everything else had been passed.

Written exams use single best answer (SBA) questions, where you pick the most appropriate of several options for a clinical scenario. Practical skills are tested in OSCEs (objective structured clinical examinations). These are circuits of timed stations where an examiner watches you take a history, examine or explain something to a simulated patient. Anatomy spot examinations ask you to identify structures on specimens or images.

At the end of the course you sit the UK Medical Licensing Assessment (UKMLA), which every UK medical student must pass as part of their degree to join the medical register. Its written half, the Applied Knowledge Test (AKT), is two computer papers of 100 SBA questions, taken in Year 5 at ARU. Its practical half, the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA), is run by each medical school. ARU also requires the Prescribing Safety Assessment, a national pass or fail test on writing and checking prescriptions and calculating doses safely.

ARU's CPSA is an OSCE in Year 5. In the design the GMC approved in February 2024, it had 14 stations over two consecutive days, using simulated patients (people briefed to play a patient) rather than real ones. Seven stations lasted 7 minutes and seven lasted 10. You had to pass at least 10 of the 14, so a strong station could not make up for a weak one. ARU planned to make all 14 stations 10 minutes long from 2024/25, if its assessment committee agreed.

Year 4 works as a rehearsal for finals, and every year group gets practice SBA questions. The Year 4 summative SBA exam, the one that counts, has two papers of 100 questions drawn from the same question bank as the AKT. The Year 4 practical exam follows the CPSA format, so you will have sat one like it before finals. Computer-based exams are sat in rooms on campus.

In Years 4 and 5 your portfolio records your professional behaviour and practical competencies, and it is formally reviewed. It can include supervised learning events, where a doctor observes you and gives feedback: case-based discussions, direct observation of procedural skills (DOPS) and mini clinical evaluation exercises (mini-CEX). It also holds reflections, supervisor reports, SSC work and your elective report.

All ARU placements are in Essex. The school works with five NHS acute hospitals, a large mental health trust and more than 60 GP surgeries, giving you a mix of urban and rural settings. Specialist experience comes from tertiary units, which treat patients referred on from other hospitals, including the St Andrew's Centre for Plastic Surgery and Burns and the Essex Cardiothoracic Centre.

In Year 1 you are allocated to a single hospital trust. Through Years 1 to 3 you combine hospital sessions and GP days with community care, mental health and interprofessional activities, and each year ends with a block placement of several weeks. In Years 4 and 5 you are in the clinical environment almost all the time.

For some placements you make your own travel arrangements, at your own cost, and ARU lists placement travel as an extra course cost. The five hospitals are spread across the county, so it is worth checking journey times from wherever you plan to live.

At the Mid and South Essex hospitals (Basildon, Broomfield and Southend), each site runs teaching programmes tailored to ARU students in every year from 1 to 5. Students on placement there can get mentoring from clinical teaching fellows, doctors in dedicated teaching posts, and are assigned an educational supervisor. The teaching fellows run simulation-based sessions mapped to the curriculum.

The Mid and South Essex hospitals also teach students from other medical schools. Broomfield and Southend take Barts and the London students in Years 3 to 5, and the trust hosts UCL students too, so you may share wards with them.

Student Selected Components (SSCs) run through all three phases. They are parts of the course where you choose the topic and study it in depth. As well as the subject itself, they build skills such as managing information, innovation, teaching, critical thinking and independent learning.

In Years 4 and 5 you choose SSCs in specialty areas you want to explore further. ARU also offers the chance to take part in research, with the potential to publish and present your work. One SSC available is in medical education, and the school's own education researchers are evaluating how students experience it.

You also complete an elective placement, which can be in the UK or overseas. It formed part of the final-year plan described to the GMC in 2022/23, and your elective report goes into your portfolio.

You are based in the School of Medicine on ARU's Chelmsford campus, a £20 million building that opened in September 2018. It holds skills laboratories, a mock hospital ward, a GP simulation suite with consultation rooms, a Harvard-style lecture theatre and the Anatomy Centre.

The GP simulation suite lets you practise consultations in a room laid out for them before you do them on placement, and the mock ward lets you rehearse hospital work in a safe setting. Patient Partners volunteers take part in teaching and assessments in this building.

The Anatomy Centre, where you dissect, also has its own embalming facilities and a dissection room with ceiling-mounted computer screens.

You also use the multi-functional SuperLab, a Category 2 laboratory, the safety level used for work with many biological samples, shared with Medical Science and Pharmaceutical Science students. It includes a physiology lab where you run tests on classmates, and demonstrations from up to four lecturers can be broadcast to your workstation.

On placement you are supported by a lead clinical educator. At the Mid and South Essex hospitals you are also assigned an educational supervisor and can get mentoring from clinical teaching fellows. Broomfield runs Tuesday Tea, a wellbeing session where students meet teaching fellows to reflect on placement, voice concerns and give feedback.

The GMC's 2022/23 review described support from the medical school on top of university services. It included clinical Personal Development Tutors for Years 3 to 5: NHS clinicians contracted to give set hours of individual and group sessions to an agreed group of students. The school had also appointed Year Leads for Years 4 and 5.

Before the GMC's November 2022 visit, some students had reported undermining remarks on placement, including from consultants and from students at other medical schools. By that visit the school had simplified its guidance on reporting such problems and discussed the reporting process with trusts on placement visits. The Year 3 and Year 5 students the GMC met raised no new concerns. The GMC kept the issue open to check the changes lasted.

Earlier, students had said placement supervisors did not always know what they could already do. The same 2022/23 report described a clinical passport, now used across all years, that records your competency sign-offs so supervisors can see what stage you have reached.