The Bristol Medicine course

The spine of years 1 and 2 is a two-week case cycle. You get lectures and online pre-learning on the science behind the case. Then comes small-group case-based learning, where your group works the case through with a tutor. A clinical and consulting skills session on the same theme follows, and then a half-day with patients. The biology, the examination and the conversation arrive together rather than years apart.

The balance tips towards the clinical setting from year 3. Year 3 is based in the academies, with alternate Tuesdays in one GP practice. Year 4 splits 36 teaching weeks between two different academies, built from six-week hospital clerkships plus a weekly GP day. Year 5 is worked rather than taught: you join teams in general practice, on the wards and in acute care.

Consulting skills run as their own thread, called Effective Consulting, across the whole degree. In the first term that is one lecture and three small-group sessions, called labs, where you practise on each other and sometimes with an actor. The same skills are then rehearsed with real patients in the GP session a few days later.

A fair amount of the preparation is yours to do alone. Year 3 sets a short online tutorial to finish before each GP day, so that the day itself can be spent with patients. Year 4 expects around an hour of pre-work each week, before the tutorial and skills session. On placement you also learn alongside students training for other health professions.

Bristol publishes the shape of its primary care days in detail, so those give the clearest picture of a week. The hospital side varies with the clerkship you are on, so treat that as the changeable part of your timetable.

A year 1 GP half-day starts at 09:00 with introductions. From 09:20 to 11:00 the practice runs a reduced surgery of three to five patients, with some of the group observing while the others meet a patient at home or at the surgery. It closes with a debrief and some clinical skills practice.

A year 2 half-day is built around two patients. You check in and set learning objectives, interview and examine the first patient, take a break, do the same with the second, then finish with a debrief and feedback from your GP tutor.

• Year 3, alternate Tuesdays: the day opens with a themed consulting workshop of about an hour and a half. Half the group then consults with patients under direct supervision while the other half sits in with another member of the practice team, swapping after lunch.
• Year 3, late afternoon: a group tutorial on the skill of the week and drug of the week, then a workplace-based assessment with one student.
• Year 4, Wednesdays: roughly 09:00 to 16:00 in the practice, including 2.5 hours of protected teaching, student-led surgeries and a tutorial. Some Bristol-area practices run this on a Monday instead.
• Year 5: six half-day sessions a week in practice, of which at least five are your own surgeries and one is a joint surgery watched by your supervisor.
• Year 5, Wednesdays: out of the practice for cluster-based teaching at your academy with four to eight students from nearby practices.
• Year 5: two protected hours a week to plan and run your own project in the practice.

Bristol's course page names cadaveric prosections among its anatomy facilities. A prosection is a body part that an expert has already dissected, so that particular structures are exposed clearly and you can see exactly what you are studying.

The teaching is run by the Bristol Anatomy Centre. It teaches medical, dental and veterinary students, and describes that teaching as using dissection, prosection, imaging and applied anatomy. Its medical and veterinary dissecting rooms are committed to undergraduate teaching during term, and are only released to outside courses out of term.

Anatomy starts in the first block of year 1, sitting alongside biochemistry, physiology, histology and neuroscience, and it keeps reappearing. In year 2 your GP teacher is asked to link the examination you are practising back to the anatomy underneath it, for example by drawing an abdomen and asking what lies where.

If you want much more of it, the centre runs an intercalated BSc in Functional and Clinical Anatomy, which medical students can take as their extra year.

Your first GP session comes within a fortnight or so of starting. The year 1 dates for 2026-27 begin on 1 October. You go in a group of four, sometimes up to six, to a practice in or very close to Bristol, and you keep the same teacher and the same practice through the year.

The first two sessions are about meeting people: everyone in the group interviews a patient at the surgery. In the third, half the group sits in on a reduced surgery while the others visit a patient at home or meet them at the practice to hear about their experience of healthcare.

From January in year 1, clinical contact alternates each fortnight between primary and secondary care, and you also spend time shadowing a healthcare assistant in a Bristol hospital. Year 2 then opens with a three-week attachment to a hospital team, focused on history and examination of the cardiovascular, respiratory and abdominal systems.

Responsibility builds after that. Year 3 has you consulting with unselected patients under direct supervision, in appointments the practice is asked to book at around 30 minutes. Year 4 asks for at least 18 student-led consultations across the GP clerkship. Year 5 gives you your own room and patient list, with a senior review after each patient.

Written assessment is built on progress tests. These are sat at intervals through the course, and they use the same question blueprint and exam software as the national final written exam. They are mainly formative, which means they do not carry a pass or a fail. Year 2, for example, sits two of them, in October and February.

Alongside those sit summative papers that do count. There are end-of-year written papers that have to be passed to move into the next year, and year 3 ends with a summative written progress test as well as a clinical exam.

The clinical exams are OSCEs. An OSCE, or Objective Structured Clinical Examination, is a circuit of short timed stations where an examiner watches you take a history, examine a patient or carry out a procedure. Year 2 has a practice version called the CAPA, the Clinical and Practical Assessment, which exists purely to give you feedback before the exams that count.

Finals at the end of year 4 are the two parts of the UK Medical Licensing Assessment. The Applied Knowledge Test is set nationally: two computer papers of 100 single best answer questions, sat on consecutive days, two hours each. The pass mark is set at the level of a doctor in their first week of foundation training. At Bristol it replaced the school's own written finals.

The other part, the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment, is run by the school. Bristol uses two circuits of eight stations over two consecutive days, so 16 stations in all, each ten minutes long with two minutes of reading time, running at several sites at once. Stations use real patients, actors or a manikin, and are pitched at the level of a first-year foundation doctor.

The GMC judged Bristol's clinical exam compliant with its national requirements in November 2023 and its knowledge test arrangements compliant in May 2024. When the GMC looked at the exam in 2023, candidates had to pass 11 of the 16 stations as well as reach the overall pass mark. The school had set that bar at 12 of 16 for 2023-24, and said it would review it again after that.

• Observed patient encounters, known as mini-CEX, and case-based discussions are used from year 3 onwards: one is a short encounter scored by a clinician, the other a structured conversation about a patient you saw.
• Team Assessment of Behaviour gathers feedback from several colleagues about how you work, which you then go through with your mentor.
• An electronic portfolio called MyProgress holds your patient log, your assessments and your skills sign-offs.
• Attendance is recorded on every placement. In years 3 and 4 you need at least 80 per cent of your general practice days to pass the clerkship; in year 5 you are expected at every scheduled session.
• The year 5 portfolio holds 16 entrustable professional activities, judged at the level of a doctor on day one of foundation training. You need 70 sign-offs across the year: 28 by the end of the first block and 56 by the end of the second.

The Clinical Academies are the thing to understand about placements here. Each one is a teaching base inside an NHS trust, working as a University of Bristol campus away from the main precinct. They have lecture and seminar rooms, a library, IT and a student common room. Postgraduate trainees, nurses and other health professionals use the same facilities, so the learning is shared.

Each academy is led by an Academy Medical Dean, who is responsible for academic leadership, your academic supervision and your pastoral care. Over the clinical years you rotate through most of the network, which is deliberate: it puts you in small rural hospitals and large city teaching hospitals, with different populations and different teams.

Year 4 makes the pattern clearest. Its 36 teaching weeks are split into two 18-week halves in two different academies, drawn from North Bristol, South Bristol, Bath, Swindon, Gloucester, Taunton and Yeovil. Year 5 cluster teaching is then held at your academy: Bath, Weston, the Bristol Royal Infirmary, Southmead, Gloucester, Swindon, Taunton or Yeovil.

General practice is organised differently. In years 1 and 2 you stay close to the university, because teaching practices for those years are in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, or in Bath. From year 3 the practices spread across the region, with dedicated GP leads for Gloucestershire and Somerset.

More than 150 practices across the region take Bristol students, and the amount of general practice in the degree has grown a lot. A student in 2015 had about 67 half-days of it over the five years; the figure for 2026 is 167.

There are also health and conduct requirements to meet. You complete a health questionnaire and a medical examination, and if you are not already immune you are immunised against hepatitis B and tuberculosis. Every medical student also has a Disclosure and Barring Service check, the criminal record check the NHS requires of people who work with patients.

The elective is a placement at the very start of year 5, and you choose where it happens. Because finals are already behind you, it lands at a point where you can use it to test a specialty you are considering rather than to revise.

Separately, the course has a student choice programme in the earlier years, which is Bristol's version of what many schools call a student selected component. Year 2 has a three-week project in September and October, some of which come with a clinical placement attached. Year 3 has a six-week project in July.

A year 3 project is meant to be a piece of real enquiry: you pick an area, gather data, analyse it and work out what it means for practice, working largely independently. Projects offered through primary care in 2026 covered general practice in the most deprived areas, migrant health and women's health.

Past projects give a sense of the range. They include audits of prescribing in specific patient groups, building e-learning for primary care, work on domestic violence support in community pharmacies, and placements in prison and homeless health services.

Intercalating means pausing medicine for a year to take a whole extra degree, then coming back. At Bristol that gap falls between years 3 and 4, it is optional, and it makes the course six years in total.

You can take a BSc, a BA, or a master's level award such as an MSc, an MRes or an LLM. All of them are run by the medical school. The list includes neuroscience, cancer biology and immunology, global health, healthcare ethics and law, medical humanities, functional and clinical anatomy, epidemiology, public health, health sciences research, and artificial intelligence for medicine and health.

Several of the BSc options work by putting you into the third year of an existing three-year degree, so you join that subject's finalists for the year. Students from other medical, dental and veterinary schools also come to Bristol to intercalate, so the cohort is not only Bristol students.

Anatomy teaching is based at the Bristol Anatomy Centre, which also houses the Vesalius Clinical Training Centre. Vesalius is used mainly for surgical and professional training courses. Its main lab has twelve height-adjustable operating tables, theatre lighting and large screens fed by a camera over the demonstration table, and the centre can store up to 52 donors.

The academies are the other half of the estate, and where you are taught changes as you rotate through them. In central Bristol, the Dolphin House academy space and the University Hospitals Bristol and Weston Education and Research Centre are a walk from the main university precinct. A South Bristol placement therefore keeps you in the city.

You are assigned a mentor who meets you regularly and follows your progress. In the early years that mentor reviews the anonymised patient cases in your portfolio and goes through the multi-source feedback your teachers and colleagues have given you.

On placement, the Academy Medical Dean is responsible for pastoral care as well as academic supervision, and the university's Student Advice Service sits behind that. If a GP teacher has a concern, they can submit a programme support request form, and senior tutors review those at least weekly.

A General Medical Council case study on Bristol's general practice teaching, published with student feedback gathered between 2021 and 2023, describes how the practical side of that works. Student support plans, written with you, are sent to practices in advance so that any learning or medical needs are known. On the first day of a GP placement you have a pastoral check, which means teaching about subjects such as cancer, suicide or miscarriage can be handled carefully if it touches your own experience.

The same case study describes the school inviting feedback a few weeks into a placement rather than only at the end, so problems can be fixed while you are still there. It also describes planning for religious and cultural needs, including prayer and rest arrangements during Ramadan and, where it matters, where a placement is located.

In year 5 the ratio is two students to one GP supervisor. The weekly cluster teaching session doubles as a check-in, because the tutor running it sees the same small group every week and can spot when someone is struggling.