The Brighton & Sussex (BSMS) Medicine course

Years 1 and 2 cover how the body works in health and disease, one system at a time. Year 1 opens with Foundations of Health and Disease in your first term, then moves on to Heart, Lungs and Blood, and Nutrition, Metabolism and Excretion. Year 2 covers Brain, Body and Mind (called Neuroscience and Behaviour in the 2026 prospectus), Musculoskeletal and Immune Systems, and Reproduction and Endocrinology. Each year also has a Clinical and Community Practice module and a Personal and Professional Development module running alongside.

Each module mixes biomedical science with psychosocial science, which looks at how illness affects a person's mind, relationships and daily life. Most Year 1 and 2 classes are in small groups, alongside core lectures and the weekly symposia. Clinical skills are taught in the Clinical and Community Practice modules, at the same time as the science. You also take student-selected components (SSCs), short modules on a topic you choose.

From Year 3 the balance flips, and most of your week is spent on clinical rotations in hospitals and general practice. The teaching year also grows, from 32 to 34 weeks in Years 1 and 2 to around 40 weeks. Classroom teaching continues alongside, for example through the weekly Scientific Basis of Medicine sessions in Year 3.

A personal and professional development strand runs through all five years. Its taught sessions cover health inequalities, professionalism, ethics, law, dealing with mistakes, teamwork, cultural humility, leadership, and quality and safety in clinical care. Nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, podiatrists and social workers also teach you. Inter-professional education, where you learn with and about other health professions, is assessed in Year 3.

Public health, the work of preventing disease and improving health across a whole population, is a theme that runs through all five years. It covers epidemiology (how diseases spread and whom they affect), research methods, health promotion and disease prevention, and it also appears inside specialties such as general practice and paediatrics. Some of it is taught with public health staff at Brighton and Hove City Council and East and West Sussex County Councils, so you work with real local health data.

BSMS publishes a sample week for each year, based on the 2024/25 timetables, so treat these as a guide. In Year 1, Monday was lectures and tutorials, and Friday morning was lectures. Tuesday began with a clinical practice lecture, followed by an afternoon placement, clinical skills or small-group work with clinical practice facilitators.

Wednesday morning in Year 1 was for academic skills tutorials or your SSC, and Wednesday afternoon was free for study or sport. Thursday opened with a symposium, sometimes with patients describing how their condition has affected them. Thursday and Friday afternoons were practical classes in the dissection room, labs, living anatomy or microbiology.

Year 2 used the same ingredients in a different order. Monday started in the dissection room and Tuesday morning was for your SSC. Thursday had the clinical practice lecture and afternoon placement, and Wednesday afternoon was kept for Time for Dementia visits or free time.

From Year 3 the week is mostly clinical. In the sample Year 3 week, Monday was lectures and Tuesday to Friday were spent on rotations. In Year 4, Monday was the research project day. In Year 5, Tuesday was for seminars and the other four days were clinical attachment, including ward rounds, clinics and skills teaching.

For 2026/27, Year 1 starts with an induction week on 21 September 2026 and finishes on 4 June 2027, exams included, with resits from 2 to 13 August. Years 1 and 2 have three terms. Year 3 starts on 14 September 2026, and Years 4 and 5 start on 1 September; all three run until mid-June.

Anatomy starts in your first term, in the Foundations of Health and Disease module, and continues through every systems module in Years 1 and 2. In each systems module you spend, on average, four sessions in the anatomy laboratory. You also have at least one tutorial on living anatomy and ultrasound in each module. Living anatomy means finding structures by their surface landmarks on living people, which is the basis of examining a patient.

Year 1 focuses on full-body cadaveric dissection, which means carefully taking apart a body donated for medical education. You work in a group of around eight students per body, with detailed notes to guide each session. Faculty and demonstrators are on hand. The demonstrators are qualified doctors working towards training in surgery or radiology. The anatomy team cares for around 60 donors a year.

Year 2 moves to prosections: specimens that experts have already dissected to show particular structures clearly. Across both years you also use plastic models, 3D-printed material, virtual and augmented reality, and an iPad app built for the dissection room. Portable ultrasound machines show you how structures look on a real clinical scan, and you learn to interpret X-rays, ultrasound and MRI images.

You come back to the anatomy facility in Year 4, during rotations such as ear, nose and throat (ENT), ophthalmology and orthopaedics. This time you study the specialised anatomy those specialties rely on.

Clinical learning starts in your first week. Placements in GP surgeries, hospitals and community settings begin from week two of Year 1. Around 20% of your learning in Years 1 and 2 is clinical, so this is regular contact rather than an occasional visit. Early on you watch doctors at work and practise the basics: taking a history, examining patients and communicating well, first in the classroom and then on placement.

Some contact is long-term. In Year 1 you may spend time learning from a family with a new baby. In Years 2 and 3 you may follow a patient with dementia or a long-term condition, and you write reports on these family studies. Year 2 adds four immersion weeks in general practice and community care.

From Year 3 you spend most of the week on hospital wards. By Year 5 you act as a member of the clinical team, closely involved in routine cases.

BSMS tests knowledge, clinical skill and professional behaviour together, so it uses many kinds of assessment. Knowledge is tested with single best answer questions, a multiple-choice format where you pick the best of several options. Every year ends with an Integrated Knowledge Test, a timed multiple-choice exam. In Years 1 and 2 it runs over two days and covers the year's systems modules, with questions spread evenly between them.

Coursework includes essays, posters, presentations, family study reports and your research project, and your personal development portfolio counts too. In the clinical years you are also assessed on placement. A case-based discussion is a timed spoken presentation of a patient you have seen, covering the history, examination, possible diagnoses and a management plan, followed by examiners' questions. A Case in Depth is a structured written report on one patient, focused on clinical decisions and the evidence for treatment.

Practical skills are tested with Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs). You move round a series of timed stations, each a clinical task such as taking a history, examining a patient or interpreting a scan, while an examiner watches and marks you. Some stations use real patients and some use actors. Your first OSCE comes in Year 2, pitched at your level, so the format is familiar well before finals.

Since 2024/25 the GMC has required a pass in the MLA for every UK medical degree. Its written part, the Applied Knowledge Test (AKT), is set nationally by the Medical Schools Council. You sit it at BSMS in Year 5, before the elective and Foundation 0, on the same day as other medical schools that choose that date. When the GMC approved BSMS's arrangements in June 2024, it was two two-hour computer papers of 100 single best answer questions each.

The MLA's practical part, the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment, is BSMS's final-year OSCE, approved by the GMC in May 2024. It is sequential: everyone sits seven 10-minute stations on one day and two 20-minute stations the next, each sequence including a real patient and a station on handling uncertainty. Students close to the pass mark sit a second sequence at least a week later, after written feedback. Anyone who fails that repeats Year 5, with mentoring and extra training.

You also sit the PSA in Year 5, a national online exam that checks you can prescribe medicines safely, for example by writing and reviewing prescriptions and calculating doses. Every new doctor must pass it by the end of their first foundation year. If you fail any assessment on the course, you get another attempt, either in a resit period a few weeks later or after repeating the year. The list below shows how the marks split each year.

• Year 1: written exams 30%, coursework 40%, practical assessments 30%.
• Year 2: written exams 14%, coursework 28%, practical assessments 58%.
• Year 3: written exams 8%, coursework 17%, practical assessments 75%.
• Year 4: written exams 10%, coursework 10%, practical assessments 80%.
• Year 5: written exams 13%, coursework 20%, practical assessments 67%.

In Years 1 and 2, placements are sessions and immersion weeks in GP surgeries, hospitals and community services, fitted around campus teaching at Falmer. General practice runs through the whole course and makes up around 15% of it. BSMS's GP calendar for 2026/27 shows two Tuesday-afternoon visits to a practice in Year 1 and three GP immersion weeks in Year 2, each running Tuesday to Thursday. In Year 4 the GP rotation lasts about four weeks, with placement days Tuesday to Friday.

From Year 3 you are based in hospitals, with much of the teaching in Brighton at the Royal Sussex County Hospital and the Audrey Emerton Building. In Year 3, surgery is a 10-week placement at the Royal Sussex County Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath. Year 3 medicine runs in hospitals of University Hospitals Sussex and East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust. Year 4 is mostly in Brighton, with blocks of one to five weeks at partner hospitals in West and East Sussex.

Year 5 opens with a 15-week regional placement, made up of five three-week attachments. BSMS's travel and accommodation policy for 2024/25, the latest it has published, names the regional centres as Chichester, Eastbourne, Hastings and Redhill. For all placements in Chichester, Eastbourne and Hastings, and most in Redhill, BSMS books and pays for accommodation in advance, mostly on or very near the hospital site. It also repays up to one return trip a week between Brighton and the regional centre.

Outside Year 5, most placements beyond Brighton that last four weeks or more are also residential, so you live near the hospital and become a full part of its team. BSMS encourages students to live in or near Brighton so they can get to placements and clinical activities.

BSMS names 12 hospitals as affiliated with the school, grouped by area below. Its two teaching trusts are University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust and Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. The first runs seven hospitals across Brighton and Hove, West Sussex and parts of East Sussex, and the second provides mental health services. Associate trusts include East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust and Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust.

Student-selected components (SSCs) let you choose what to study in depth, informed by current research. You take two SSC modules in each of Years 1 and 2. Options have included research projects, imaging at the on-campus Clinical Imaging Sciences Centre, and a course on the poetry of medicine that explored the human side of illness through creative writing.

In Year 3 the SSCs are longer, and many students use them to do more research. This leads into the Individual Research Project in Year 4.

The elective is a four-week placement towards the end of Year 5, after finals. You spend it in a clinical, non-clinical or research setting different from your training so far, in the UK or abroad, and with guidance you set your own learning goals. You cover the travel and living costs yourself, though reimbursement schemes and bursaries can help.

Intercalating means taking a year out of medicine to earn a second degree, a BSc or a master's, before returning to the course. At BSMS it is optional and happens between Years 3 and 4, subject to your performance, so your studies take six years instead of five. Places are capped at 40% of the cohort, with priority for students who do not already have a degree. In a 2024 submission to the GMC, BSMS said about 40% of its students intercalate.

As a rule of thumb, a bachelor's needs two years (240 credits) of study before you start, and a master's needs three years (360 credits). After three years of medicine you may therefore qualify for a master's. You can intercalate at BSMS, the University of Brighton, the University of Sussex or another university. Most options include a research project, and depending on the project you may be able to publish or present your findings. The options listed by BSMS are:

• At BSMS: MSc Ageing and Dementia, Global Health, Healthcare Leadership and Commissioning, Medical Education, Medical Research, Paediatrics and Child Health, or Public Health.
• At the University of Brighton: BSc Sport and Exercise Science, MSc Applied Exercise Physiology, MRes Stress, Ageing and Chronic Disease, MSc Strength and Conditioning, MSc Health Promotion, or Applied Sport Physiology MSc.
• At the University of Sussex: BSc Biochemistry, BSc Neuroscience, BSc Medical Neuroscience, or Experimental Psychology MSc.

Years 1 and 2 use purpose-built facilities on the Falmer campuses. These include the anatomy laboratory, lecture theatres, seminar rooms, clinical science labs and IT suites. The clinical skills area, with its mock consultation rooms and patient simulator, is here too, as is the Clinical Imaging Sciences Centre.

In Brighton, the Audrey Emerton Building has a medical library, computer suites, pathology facilities, a clinical skills area, teaching rooms and a top-floor restaurant with sea views. The Louisa Martindale Building opened in 2023 at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, with outpatient, ward and specialist services across 11 floors. Besides the university libraries at Falmer, there are NHS libraries at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, the Sussex Education Centre in Hove and the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath.

Much of your learning is supported online. My Studies holds lecture recordings, quizzes and interactive cases. Capsule offers over 750 clinical cases for practising investigation, diagnosis and management, matched to the MLA. SmartDrug trains prescribing, and the Anatomy Lab Interface app supports dissection sessions. Sofia maps the curriculum against the GMC's graduate outcomes and the MLA. BSMS students also get free access to Passmedicine, a revision question bank, in Years 4 and 5.

In Year 1 you are given a personal tutor, a clinician (usually a GP, hospital consultant or specialist doctor) who supports you until graduation. You meet at least three times a year, about once a term, to discuss your progress and any problems. Tutors also help deliver the personal and professional development teaching. You record these meetings, reflections on critical incidents and your achievements in an e-portfolio similar to the one junior doctors use.

From day one you belong to an academic support group of eight students, deliberately mixed to include school leavers, graduates and mature students. There is a buddy scheme for Year 1 students. Medic families add a peer network, in which fellow students take the role of parents and siblings to help you settle in.

The Student Wellbeing and Advice team are non-academic staff who give confidential help. They can advise on health, stress, homesickness, time management, money, course difficulties and reporting bullying or harassment, and can refer you to specialist services. Designated clinical staff at each training hospital support you on placement. Students with disabilities, long-term conditions or dyslexia can get a Learning Support Plan setting out reasonable adjustments to teaching and exams. The course also includes teaching on looking after your own wellbeing.