The Cardiff Medicine courseWhat you actually study, and where you will be
Photo: Jeremy Segrott (from Cardiff, Wales, UK) / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0 · cropped
Photo: Jeremy Segrott from Cardiff, Wales, UK · CC BY 2.0 · Photo: Armonjones · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Photo: M J Richardson · CC BY-SA 2.0
The Cardiff medicine course at a glance
Cardiff's C21 curriculum is case-based from the first week and spiral across the five years. Its most distinctive feature is geographic: you can be based in north Wales for all or part of the course and still graduate with Cardiff's MBBCh.
How Cardiff teaches medicine
The MBBCh, known as C21, is an "integrated spiral curriculum". The primary mode of delivery in years 1 and 2 is case-based learning — small groups with a trained facilitator, working through a series of patient cases that typically run about two weeks each.
What that means day to day
Year by year at Cardiff
Where you will actually be at Cardiff
Placement geography is the part of a medicine course that changes your life most and appears in prospectuses least. Here is what Cardiff publishes.
C21 allows students the option of being based in north Wales for all or part of the programme while still graduating with Cardiff University’s MBBCh. The CARER programme offers year 3 in a general practice in west or north Wales.
Worth knowing about Cardiff
- You can spend all or part of the course based in north Wales and still graduate from Cardiff.
Applying to Cardiff?
How to get into Cardiff
Entry requirements, UCAT, personal statement and interview, step by step.
Open the guide →Cardiff UCAT cut-offs and offers
UCAT cut-offs, A-level offers, interview format and decision dates.
See the requirements →Compare Cardiff with other schools
Put the teaching style, anatomy teaching and placements next to another school.
Open the comparison →Prepare for the Cardiff interview
Format breakdown, school-specific sample questions and prep tips from tutors who interviewed here.
Read the guide →Where this Cardiff course profile came from
Cardiff University's course page could not be read directly by our tooling — it either sits behind a bot wall or renders in the browser — so this page was built from the university's own published course and school pages, checked on 2026-09-11. Confirm the detail against the official page before you rely on it.
Primary source: Cardiff University — official course information.
Courses are restructured between cycles. Anything here that decides your application — an anatomy offer, a placement city, a compulsory intercalated year — should be confirmed against the official page for your entry year.
Applying to Cardiff?
We have helped hundreds of applicants turn their UCAT, personal statement and interview prep into offers from Cardiff and other UK medicine schools.