The Chester Medical School (GEM) Medicine course

CBL is the centre of the course in all four years. Your small group works with a tutor on cases that reflect current clinical practice. Rather than being handed a list of facts, the group works out what it needs to know to understand the patient, then follows that up through guided study and in your own time.

The school says CBL mirrors the way doctors keep learning throughout their careers, and it expects you to draw on the knowledge and experience you already have. Each case mixes biomedical science, psychological and social factors and clinical practice. Working through cases together also builds teamwork and communication, which you will rely on in every clinical team.

Around the CBL sessions you have interactive lectures, seminars, anatomy and imaging, clinical and communication skills sessions and some e-learning. The course is designed for in-person study, with a few online activities.

The setting changes sharply after Year 1. In Year 1 most teaching happens on campus. From Year 2 you rotate through clinical placements, and much of your teaching comes from the clinicians you work with. Academic blocks and days on campus are built into Years 2 to 4 for extra teaching, support and consolidation.

You also learn with and about other health professionals. The clinical skills and simulation facility is shared with other healthcare courses and hosts interprofessional sessions throughout the programme. The nine curriculum themes that run through every year are listed below.

• Personal and Professional Development
• Social and Population Perspectives
• Cell and Tissue Biomedicine
• Pharmacology, Prescribing and Therapeutics
• Clinical Anatomy and Imaging
• Clinical and Communication Skills
• Values, Law and Ethics
• Community Learning
• Research, Education and Leadership
• Alongside the themes runs a professionalism and personal development strand. It covers teamworking, patient safety and how medical errors happen, leadership, managing uncertainty and complexity, prioritising your time, teaching others, reflection and looking after your own wellbeing.

The university's 2026 module description for Year 1 lists 599 hours of timetabled teaching and 505 hours of independent study over a standard 30 weeks. That averages about 20 hours a week of scheduled sessions, such as CBL groups, lectures, anatomy practicals and clinical skills, plus around 17 hours of study on your own. On top come 96 hours of placement, including a creative health placement, where you see how arts and creative activities are used to support health and wellbeing.

Year 2 is mostly placement. Its 2026 module description lists 720 placement hours across three nine-week Core Clinical Education (CCE) blocks, which works out at roughly 27 hours a week while a block runs. Around them sit four academic blocks of lectures, workshops and practical classes, with 240 hours of timetabled teaching and 240 hours of independent study across a 44-week year.

A Year 2 block is not only hospital work. The school's 2025/26 guidance for placement providers shows that the medicine block and the community and specialty block each include general practice, where you must complete at least 18 face-to-face patient consultations. The community and specialty block also has a community placement every Thursday.

Year 3 opens with an eight-week project block that mixes teaching at the Wheeler Building with two or three self-directed days a week for your project. Across Year 3, teaching is grouped into fuller days, some running from 9am to 5pm, so that you make fewer trips into university for single sessions. These details come from the 2026/27 Year 3 handbook.

Once the specialist placements start, you spend most days at your placement hospital or service. On the first, third and fifth Mondays of each block the whole year group returns to the university for an academic day built around that week's CBL case. Prescribing sessions on these days prepare you for the Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA), a national online exam that checks you can prescribe medicines safely. The five-week medical block has no academic days.

Some blocks follow their own pattern. In the six-week general practice block you are at your practice every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, and at the university every Thursday and on the second, fourth and sixth Mondays. In the surgical block you normally attend from 08:00 to 16:00, with ward rounds often starting at 8am or earlier, and the emergency surgery week can bring later starts and evening finishes.

Anatomy belongs to the Clinical Anatomy and Imaging theme and is taught every week. Each week's anatomy follows the themes of that week's CBL cases and links closely to your clinical skills sessions. That way you see straight away why the structures you are learning matter when you examine a patient.

You first cover the topic in a seminar, then in a practical session led by anatomists. The practical sessions take place in a newly built anatomy facility in the Wheeler Building, next to the clinical skills and simulation suites.

The school combines several tools. Plastinated specimens are real human bodies or body parts preserved with a plastic-like material, so they can be handled safely and studied again and again. You use them alongside 3D anatomy software, augmented reality, which lays digital images over what you see, and medical imaging such as scans. The course page also shows students working together at an Anatomage table, a life-size touchscreen that displays a 3D virtual body you can cut through layer by layer.

The school uses real human specimens so that you see how intricate anatomy is and how it varies from one person to another, as well as how it applies to clinical work.

You meet patients in Year 1, even though most of that year is on campus. You are prepared first through clinical skills training and simulated consultations. You then take part in GP and community placements and hospital-based teaching, which put you in front of a range of patients in different settings.

During Year 1 you also follow patients along their care pathway, the route a person takes through different health and care services, and learn what the different health and social care workers do.

Contact rises steeply from Year 2, when you spend most of your time in clinical settings, and continues through the specialist placements of Years 3 and 4. The course ends with the Assistantship, a placement in which you work alongside Foundation doctors to prepare for your own first job.

Year 1 has three assessments, and each is pass or fail. The first is a 4-hour written exam of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and very short answer questions, where you type a word or phrase rather than pick from a list. The second is a 3.5-hour Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE): you move round timed stations, each testing one task, such as examining a patient or explaining a treatment. The third assesses your professionalism, including attendance, engagement and reflection.

At the end of Year 2 you sit two 2-hour papers on screen, mixing MCQs and short answer questions, and the two scores are combined into a mark out of 200. The pass mark is set by examiners judging how a borderline student would do on each question. You also sit a 2.5-hour OSCE and complete a logbook of practical procedures practised in simulation. You must pass every part to move into Year 3.

On placement, the clinicians you work with assess you through workplace-based assessments. In a mini clinical evaluation exercise (mini-CEX), a senior clinician watches you with a patient and gives feedback. In a case-based discussion (CBD), you talk them through a patient you have seen. An Objective Structured Long Examination Record (OSLER) is a long case: you take a full history from one patient, examine them and present your findings.

In Year 2 you complete one mini-CEX, one CBD and one OSLER on each hospital placement. They are formative, meaning they are for feedback: you can fail one, but you must complete them and get a satisfactory sign-off at the end of each block. In Year 3 each block needs at least one mini-CEX and one CBD, plus an OSLER in the last two weeks that a consultant grades.

Each Year 3 block also has a 50-question practice MCQ test in the style of the MLA's knowledge exam. You collect Team Assessment of Behaviour (TAB) forms, in which doctors, nurses and other staff rate your teamwork, communication and professionalism, and need at least 14 by the end of the seventh block. You log practical skills done on real patients in your e-portfolio, with at least eight signed off by the fourth block.

In Year 4 you sit the MLA. It has two parts, both taken at Chester on dates the school sets. The Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) is an on-screen multiple-choice exam, and the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA) is a practical exam that Chester designs and runs. Both count only once the GMC confirms they meet its standards. No decision on Chester's had been published by September 2026, and a full new submission is due by January 2027.

• Attendance: in Years 1 and 2 you are expected to attend everything, and to progress you need at least 80% attendance plus evidence that you have caught up on anything you missed.
• On placement, 100% attendance is required. Missing scheduled sessions is treated as a professionalism concern, and you can fail a placement for poor attendance.
• At the end of each placement a senior clinician, such as your supervising consultant or educational supervisor, signs you off once they are satisfied you are working at the level expected for your stage.

Your placements are in community services, GP practices and NHS hospitals across Cheshire, Shropshire and North Wales, and the 2026/27 Year 3 handbook adds a week in Liverpool for every student. The areas below list the trusts and hospitals the school names. The university presents its course-page list as a summary of some partners, not a complete list.

Placements run as rotations. In Year 2 you move through the three CCE blocks, and in Years 3 and 4 you rotate through the SCPs with a student group, so your timetable depends on your group. The NHS organisations that host students are called local education providers (LEPs). The GMC also heard in 2026 that private, independent and voluntary organisations help the school deliver placement experiences.

On every placement a clinical supervisor, normally a consultant-level doctor, oversees your day-to-day work and makes sure you only do what you are trained and safe to do. Your educational supervisor holds overall responsibility for your progress. At your first meeting they check you have had an induction and a timetable, and you agree your learning objectives for the block.

Travel to placements is one of the extra costs the university lists as not covered by tuition fees. Some blocks take you further afield for weeks at a time: in Year 3 the MSK block keeps you in Oswestry, Shropshire, for five weeks, and the medical block includes a week in Liverpool.

Student-selected components (SSCs) are projects you choose, and they run through all four years. Each option relates to the core curriculum but lets you go deeper into one topic, which can come from the scientific, clinical or social sciences. They are designed to build research skills you will use long after the course.

In Year 2 your SSC focuses on an area of practice or a clinical specialty that interests you. In Year 3 it is a research project, completed during the block that opens the year.

Your elective comes in Year 4, after the MLA exams. It is a chance to explore an area of medicine that interests you, and you can take it in the UK or overseas.

The Wheeler Building on Castle Drive, overlooking the River Dee in Chester city centre, is the home of the MBChB. It holds the clinical skills and simulation facility, the newly built anatomy facility next to it, a 192-seat lecture theatre and a library with health collections and computer suites.

Wheeler is shared with the university's School of Nursing and Midwifery and School of Law and Social Justice. It is about a 20-minute walk from both Chester railway station and the university's Exton Park site, and there is no student parking at the building.

Bache Hall, next to the Countess of Chester Hospital, is Chester Medical School's research base. It has laboratories for work such as tissue culture, cell imaging, molecular biology and microbiology, research clinic rooms, a computer suite with statistics software and seminar rooms for small-group teaching.

You have a Personal Academic Tutor through the university's tutor system. When you are on placement, the school links this with your clinical supervision, so academic and clinical problems can be spotted and sorted out together.

Your educational supervisor on each placement is your first point of contact if you are worried about patient safety or about a teacher or department. They can point you to the school's Raise a Concern form, and they are expected to talk with you about your career plans.

The school has a Student Support Lead, and its staff include a senior lecturer whose role covers student support. If you are disabled or have a long-term health condition, you, the school and the placement agree a Reasonable Adjustment Placement Plan to identify and address any barriers to learning on placement. You still need to reach the same standards as every other student.