The Birmingham Medicine course

In years 1 and 2 you are on campus most days. Teaching is a mix of lectures, small-group sessions, anatomy practicals and self-guided study, with one day each week on clinical skills. Formative work, which is practice that is marked and fed back on but does not count towards your grade, runs through both years.

The first two years are organised into named strands rather than separate subject courses. The science and population-health teaching runs through two of them, Fundamental Clinical Sciences and Social Science, Health and Health Promotion. A third, Skills for Life, Academia and Medicine, is there to support your move into university study. The Introductory Clinical Course pairs practical history and examination sessions on campus with your general practice placement.

From semester 2 of year 1, a strand called Integrated Thinking asks you to apply what you know to unfamiliar situations rather than recall facts. That is the skill the clinical years then demand. Year 2 keeps the same strands and covers the specialties that year 1 did not reach.

From year 3 the balance changes completely. Around 64 per cent of year 3 is spent on placement, rising to 65 per cent in year 4 and 66 per cent in year 5. Scheduled teaching falls to roughly 13, 10 and 3 per cent across those same years. Most learning now happens on wards, in clinics and in surgeries, with campus teaching and your own study filling the gaps.

Birmingham teaches the MBChB inside a medical school that also runs pharmacy, nursing and biomedical science degrees, and you learn alongside those students. Interprofessional working means learning to do your job in a team with other health professions. It is one of the named themes that run the length of the new curriculum, and it has its own lead in the MBChB team.

The school publishes the shape of the week rather than a full timetable. In years 1 and 2 a normal day starts at 09:00 and finishes at 17:00 or 18:00, and Wednesday afternoons have traditionally been kept clear for sport. One of those days each week is your clinical skills day.

Most of the time in those years is yours to manage. About 67 per cent of year 1 and 69 per cent of year 2 is independent study, with roughly 18 to 19 per cent in timetabled teaching and the remainder on placement.

In years 3 to 5 the day can start at 08:00 or 08:30, depending on what has been arranged. You are expected to be at your placement for five to six hours a day, not counting lunch. In the later years you also cover a late shift or an evening, night or weekend shift, so you see how a hospital runs outside office hours.

Attendance is taken seriously. The programme requires at least 80 per cent attendance on every placement. There is a limited amount of catch-up in the clinical years, and none for teaching sessions missed in years 1 and 2, so absences need watching.

Anatomy at Birmingham is taught on prosections. A prosection is a body or body part that staff have already dissected, so the structures are exposed for you to study rather than something you cut open yourself. The Medical School building has its own prosectorium for this work.

Sessions there run as discussion groups supported by academic staff. They sit alongside other ways of seeing the body: anatomical models, surface anatomy, 3-D software with virtual dissection tools, video animations and ultrasound equipment.

The department also uses large touch-screen tables, where you explore a digital body with tutors and demonstrators on hand. Lectures cover topographical and regional anatomy, which means learning the body area by area. Histology, the study of tissue under the microscope, is taught in online interactive sessions with live polling on images.

The anatomy team teaching medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and biomedical science includes two senior lecturers, a lecturer, seven teaching fellows and eight demonstrators. Among them are junior doctors building careers in surgery, radiology and pathology, so the teaching tends to be framed around how anatomy is used clinically.

If full dissection appeals, that is what the intercalated Clinical Anatomy MSci offers. It includes guided dissection with anatomists and surgeons, a dissection logbook, and an oral exam over a dissected specimen.

Your very first placement is in general practice, inside your first fortnight. Birmingham calls these Community Based Medicine placements. They are teaching placements built around a small group of four to six students rather than work experience. They run in every year of the course, and you move to a different practice each year.

In years 1 and 2 your practice teaches for 16 days a year, split between two groups of about six students, so you get eight days there. You learn to take a history and to do basic clinical skills such as blood pressure and simple heart and chest examinations. You also interview patients about how an illness affects their daily life, then work the cases through in tutorials.

Back on campus, the Introductory Clinical Course teaches history taking and examination in practical sessions, so you arrive at the surgery with something specific to try. In year 2 that course carries on into the specialties year 1 did not cover, and placements widen into schools and other community settings.

Hospital contact builds more slowly. Year 1 includes a hospital orientation day. In year 2 you do a two-week Hospital Preparation Course, usually at the hospital where you will be based in year 3. It replaced a two-day placement for everyone starting from 2026.

Year 3 is when full-time clinical placement begins, and from that point hospitals and surgeries are where most of your learning happens.

Every year of the course is a single module, Medicine 1 through to Medicine 5. The module catalogue sets out how the first two are examined: a written applied knowledge test, a practical clinical exam and a portfolio of work. All three are hurdles in years 1 and 2, so each has to be passed separately. Failing one sends you to a resit in the supplementary period even if the other two went well.

The applied knowledge test, or AKT, is a closed-book written exam. In years 1 and 2 it comes in two parts. Part A is a two-hour paper in January and counts for a third of the AKT mark. Part B follows in the summer as two two-hour sittings and carries the other two thirds.

The practical exam is the clinical and professional skills assessment, or CPSA. In years 1 and 2 it mixes two kinds of station. An objective structured clinical examination station, known as an OSCE, gives you a task such as taking a history while an examiner marks against a set scheme. An objective structured practical examination, or OSPE, tests practical and interpretive skills.

Some stations are watched by an examiner and some are not. To pass year 1 you need 50 per cent across the written exams and 50 per cent across the practical ones. Within that practical mark you also need at least 40 per cent in the unobserved stations, and passes in a set number of the OSCE-style stations.

The portfolio carries no marks in those two years but still has to be passed. It runs across four domains: mandatory requirements, academic skills, skills for patient care and professional behaviours. Much of it is built from timetabled teaching, it is submitted in May, and a panel judges it against a rubric. Review points in each semester flag anyone off track, so problems are caught during the year rather than at the end of it.

The clinical years work differently. Sign-offs called Direct Observation of Examination Skills, where a clinician watches you examine a patient, must be passed in each of years 3, 4 and 5. University Hospitals Birmingham runs the year 3, 4 and 5 practical exams for the medical school as its end-of-year exams. They follow a format close to the final-year one, so finals is an exam you have already sat twice. Year 5 finals also include the Medical Licensing Assessment.

• In a compliance decision published in May 2024, the General Medical Council recorded Birmingham's plan for the final practical exam. It is 12 stations taken in a single day, cut down from 14 stations across two days, for students graduating from 2024/25. The school was changing both its curriculum and this exam at the time.
• The same 2024 decision records stations of ten minutes, with three minutes of reading time beforehand, and the exam running at ten different sites on different days.
• Under that decision, passing needs at least 50 per cent overall plus a pass in eight of the 12 stations.
• Physical examination is assessed instead through the Direct Observation of Examination Skills sign-offs on placement, which is why they matter.
• Alongside those sign-offs there is a list of practical clinical procedures to get through each year. You practise them in simulation first, then do them on placement under observation, and each one is signed off in the same electronic portfolio.
• Prescribing is assessed through the national Prescribing Safety Assessment, a pass or fail test for final-year students, with the British National Formulary available throughout it.
• The General Medical Council recorded in 2024 that clinical written exams fall between April and June. Each exam period is followed by an exam board, with progression boards after the summer resits.
• At Russells Hall Hospital the practical exams are held over two to three days each February.
• You are told how each module is assessed at the start of it, and feedback arrives within four weeks.
• Progression also requires at least 80 per cent attendance on placements.

Placements are the core of years 3 to 5 and start in a small way in year 1. The medical school uses 15 hospitals within easy travelling distance of campus, sorted into three groups by distance, and around 131 general practices across the West Midlands.

Every student is allocated placements in all three distance groups over the course, so nobody stays close to Edgbaston the whole way through and nobody spends five years commuting. The school says it monitors distance travelled to keep travel costs fair. You are not normally allowed to swap a placement with another student.

Every trust organises its weeks differently, so two students in the same year can have quite different timetables. The Russells Hall examples elsewhere in this guide are one trust's published timetable rather than the pattern at every site. What does not change is the range of blocks you have to cover and the standards you are held to.

If you cannot travel to every site, because of health, caring responsibilities or a reasonable adjustment, there is a formal route. Before each academic year you submit a special placements request with evidence, which a committee considers, and you are told the outcome well before term starts. Students with ongoing needs reapply each year.

Most sites are reachable by public transport or car, and students often share lifts. The campus has its own station on the Cross-City Line, with trains to Birmingham New Street every ten minutes at peak times. The college contributes to travel costs in proportion to time spent on placement.

On every placement you are assigned a Senior Academy Tutor, normally with five or six students, who meets you regularly and completes an end-of-placement review. Day-to-day supervision comes from junior and senior doctors and from other clinicians such as physiotherapists, nurses and ECG technicians. Each hospital also has teaching fellows, and University Hospitals Birmingham employs 11 of them across its sites. Each placement has a coordinator who is your contact in an emergency.

The elective is a placement you design yourself. At Birmingham it falls in the spring of year 5 and is worth 10 credits. The period is six weeks, and at least four of them must be spent on the learning activity itself, normally in one setting.

It can be in the UK or overseas and does not have to be a hospital. Past projects have been in primary and secondary care, laboratories, education and leadership settings and the charity sector. The work can be a placement, structured observation, shadowing, research where ethical approval is possible, or a literature review.

You prepare by submitting a project protocol and a careful risk assessment, and completing the elective is a requirement for graduating. Most students fund it themselves. A small number of competitive bursaries are advertised through the module, and students on the NHS England bursary can access extra funds towards accommodation and other costs. Turing Fund support for overseas trips is advertised each February.

Two other choose-your-own blocks sit earlier in the course. The school lists a student selected experience among the year 3 placements and a selected career experience in year 4. Both let you follow an interest before you commit to an elective topic.

Intercalating means stepping out of medicine for a year to take a separate degree, then returning to where you left off. At Birmingham it is optional, and the course page says it usually happens between years 2 and 3. You need to meet academic criteria showing you are doing well on the medical course.

The options range from laboratory science to subjects well outside medicine. On the science side there is a BMedSc in Medical Science and MSci degrees in Medical Sciences or Clinical Anatomy. Further afield sit a BA in Medical Humanities, an MSci in Health Management and Leadership, and BSc degrees in Human Neuroscience or Sport, Exercise and Health Science. You can also take a year in Computer Science or in Civic Leadership.

Timing depends on the degree. The BMedSc is open only to Birmingham medicine and dentistry students who have finished year 2, 3 or 4. The Clinical Anatomy MSci takes medical students in year 3 or 4, and dental students in year 2, so it falls later than the usual break between years 2 and 3.

The BMedSc runs for a year. You take taught modules in the first term alongside third-year biomedical science students, then a 50-credit research project through the spring term. Modules in experimental data interpretation and a global challenge sit alongside them. The Clinical Anatomy MSci is 120 credits of dissection-based anatomy, embryology and a research project, assessed partly by a dissection logbook and an oral exam over a specimen.

If you have already completed three years, you can instead join an intercalated master's. Those include public health, health research methods, health economics and health policy, clinical trials, health data science, mental health, and artificial intelligence implementation in healthcare.

Teaching is concentrated in the Medical School building on the Edgbaston campus, which is open to students at all hours with its own security staff. It houses the prosectorium and the anatomy touch-screen tables, and a library for College of Medicine and Health students.

Lectures happen in theatres set up for recording and for electronic audience voting. The Leonard Deacon Lecture Theatre seats 450, enough for a whole year group of about 400 students, and the Arthur Thomson Hall seats 398.

For study there is the Doug Ellis Learning Hub, with open study space and laptops to borrow. The Barnes Medical Library sits next to it and holds the core texts, and a computer cluster of 276 machines fills part of the second floor.

Course material sits on Canvas, the virtual learning environment, and you build your portfolio in PebblePad from first year. From year 3 you also get SCRIPT, the prescribing and therapeutics course written by college staff. Core texts come as ebooks, among them Gray's Anatomy, Kumar and Clark's Clinical Medicine and Rang and Dale's Pharmacology, so the reading list does not have to be bought.

The building also has MedCafé, which serves hot food and drinks from 08:30 to 16:00 on weekdays in term time, and the Wolfson Student Common Room to sit in between sessions. There are lockers, prayer rooms, meeting rooms for student societies and baby changing and feeding facilities.

Birmingham has announced a second teaching centre nearby. The Birmingham Centre for Anatomy, Surgical and Clinical Skills will take 50,000 square feet of the first building on the Birmingham Health Innovation Campus, a short walk from the Medical School. Plans set out mock hospital wards, consulting rooms and a surgical theatre, wired with cameras, microphones and green screens so sessions can be filmed and reviewed. Surgical skills space with cadaveric and simulated facilities is planned for students and postgraduate trainees. The university announced it in March 2025 with planning permission granted, and has not published an opening date.

You are assigned a personal academic tutor who follows you through the degree, gets to know you and gives academic advice as you go. On placement, your Senior Academy Tutor and the hospital's teaching fellows are the people to go to first with anything affecting your learning there.

The College of Medicine and Health has its own student services space inside the Medical School, with a help desk open through the week and four confidential consultation rooms. Wellbeing officers see students in 30-minute appointments that you book yourself, and the careers service runs sessions in the same space.

Those wellbeing officers work closely with academic and education support staff, so the advice takes your course into account: assessment deadlines, progression points, extenuating circumstances and what happens if you need time out. The school states plainly that telling staff you are unwell will not stop you becoming a doctor.

The Interactive Studies Unit also runs one-to-one help for students who are struggling with language, communication, professional behaviour or organisation rather than with clinical procedures. It takes up to 70 students a year from across the college's healthcare courses.

The portfolio has review points built into both semesters, so a student who is drifting is picked up mid-year and offered remediation rather than finding out in May. The college also runs Pathways to Medicine, a peer mentoring scheme for students who enter through an access programme. Outside teaching, the student-run medical society MedSoc is open to everyone in the College of Medicine and Health. It runs dozens of sports teams, charity groups and academic societies as well as social events, so you meet nursing, pharmacy, dentistry and biomedical science students as well as your own year.

Preparation for the practical exams is built in. You get an assessment briefing at the start of each year. Filmed example stations and their marking rubrics sit on the virtual learning environment, so you can see what a pass looks like. Students returning after time out of the course can take a Refresher of Clinical Skills each June, eight stations in the same format, purely for practice and feedback.