The Dundee Medicine course

Dundee teaches through lectures, small-group teaching, case-based teaching, dissection, simulation, ward experience and clinical placements. Interactive quizzes, a digital resource library and regular formative assessment support your own study. Formative assessments show you how you are doing but do not count towards your marks. Summative assessments are the ones that count towards whether you pass the year.

In years 1 to 3 the teaching is organised by body system. After the opening Foundations of Medicine block, each block covers one set of organs, and the weeks inside a block are usually themed around a common problem that brings patients to a doctor. Classroom teaching runs alongside clinical skills practice, meeting real patients and time on the wards from the start of year 1.

This is the spiral. From day one the course lays down the building blocks for every part of a medical career, then keeps coming back to them and adding more. A topic you first meet in year 1 reappears in later years with more depth, rather than being taught and examined once.

Years 4 and 5 are clinical training. You rotate between hospitals and primary care centres in a series of clinical attachments, and the focus moves from single diseases to the patient as a whole person, with their concerns at the centre. Formally, each year of the course is one year-long module, from MS10200 in year 1 to MS50200 in year 5.

Dundee teaches anatomy by dissection. You work on whole bodies donated to the university and preserved by Thiel embalming. Unlike traditionally embalmed bodies, these keep flexible, realistic tissue, lifelike colour and joints with their full range of movement. The fascial layers, thin sheets of tissue between structures, are preserved too.

According to a Dundee student's 2024 account on the university's website, dissection starts in the first semester of year 1, and the anatomy you study is lined up with the body system being taught. The sessions also build your skill in handling a scalpel and in suturing, which means stitching tissue closed. Your anatomy knowledge is tested in anatomy spot tests, practical exams in which you identify structures on specimens.

The bodies are held in the Thiel Cadaver Facility, part of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) in the Medical Science Institute on Dow Street. It keeps about 200 Thiel-embalmed bodies at any one time, supported by around 90 donations a year. Its main Dissecting Room has 30 dissection stations, and a Functional Teaching Suite has nine teaching bays. Learning anatomy through dissection is one of the uses the facility lists.

Because the bodies stay flexible, the same facility is used to train surgeons and test medical devices. The bodies can be moved into any position and imaged with X-ray, CT, MRI and ultrasound, and they allow practice of camera-based procedures such as endoscopy and laparoscopy.

You start learning to take a clinical history, which means asking a patient the right questions about their illness, and to carry out a clinical examination in year 1. According to the same 2024 student account, first-year clinical skills classes take place at Ninewells Hospital. They begin with the general examination, an overall check of how the patient looks, and then follow the body systems you are studying.

Your early years also include placements in general practice, where you meet patients in the community. Dundee says classroom learning is combined with meeting real patients and ward experience from the start of year 1. Its open-door policy means you can go onto the wards and speak to patients at any time.

From year 4 the balance changes. Clinical training becomes a series of longer placements, each a few weeks long, in hospitals and primary care. In year 5 you spend eight weeks with one clinical team as a foundation assistant, working alongside the ward doctors.

Dundee assesses you through essays, case discussions, self-directed research, online exams that are usually multiple choice, anatomy spot tests, OSCEs and a portfolio. Some assessment, such as the portfolio, runs through the year; the rest is exams at the end of the year. Every year has formative assessment for practice, and at the end of each year you must pass a summative assessment to move on.

An OSCE is a practical exam. You move around a series of stations in the simulated ward, with an examiner marking you at each one. At a station you either perform a clinical task or respond to an actor playing a patient with symptoms. It tests your clinical skills and whether you stay calm and make good decisions under pressure.

The professional portfolio runs through the whole course. Each year you reflect on your progress, so the school can check you are developing core skills and professional behaviour. Practical procedures are assessed through a separate skills passport, which you must complete.

The written half of the MLA is the Applied Knowledge Test run nationally by the Medical Schools Council (MS AKT). Dundee uses it as its year 4 written finals, with no separate knowledge exam that year. It is two computer-based papers of 100 single best answer questions, where you pick the best of several options, sat on consecutive days with two hours each. The pass mark is set nationally at the level of a new doctor in their first week of work.

The clinical half, the CPSA, is sat in year 5 in the Clinical Skills Centre. In the version the GMC approved in May 2024, it is a 12-station OSCE run over two days, six stations a day. Each station lasts 14 minutes after two minutes of reading time, long enough for a full consultation. Some stations use real patients, so you have to find and interpret genuine clinical signs.

To pass the CPSA you need an overall score above the pass mark and at least seven of the 12 stations passed. Examiners are consultants, senior registrars, GPs or senior academics, and they mark every station against the same five areas of performance, one of which covers patient safety. You must normally attend at least 90 per cent of teaching to sit your exams, and pass every other element before taking the CPSA.

• Each summative exam normally has one main attempt and one resit
• If you fail both attempts at the MS AKT, you repeat year 4 and get two further attempts, four in total
• Failing the year 4 OSCE also means repeating the year and retaking the MS AKT, even if you passed it
• Students on ScotGEM, the graduate-entry course Dundee runs with the University of St Andrews, sit the same Dundee CPSA

Most of your teaching takes place at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, where the School of Medicine is based. Dundee says its Ninewells teaching is complemented by several other hospital sites and general practices across Scotland.

Early-year placements are based in general practice. In years 4 and 5 you rotate between hospitals and primary care centres in attachments of a few weeks each, so expect to spend some of your clinical training away from Ninewells.

Student selected components (SSCs) are blocks of self-directed study in an area of medicine that interests you. You either spend time on a placement or do a project supervised by an expert in that subject. They run in years 2, 3 and 5.

Recent SSCs have included clinical placements in pathology, microbiology, biochemistry and surgery, and community outreach projects. Others were projects with other parts of the university, such as arts and humanities, quality improvement projects that test ways to make care safer or better, and work on innovation and technology. A Dundee student's 2025 account on the university's website adds that SSC placements or projects can even be overseas.

The elective is an eight-week block in year 5 when you choose both the specialty and the place, in the UK or abroad. At least six of the eight weeks must be clinical placement. You organise it yourself around your own learning goals, and preparation usually starts 12 to 18 months before.

Dundee's Responsible Elective Programme sets an ethical framework for electives in low and middle income countries, where a visiting student can help or burden a host. Its partner sites are in Malawi and Zambia, and a partnership in Rwanda is being explored. On this programme you can choose an extended elective, spending ten weeks with your host instead of six, because the partners say students help more once they have settled in. You must also fundraise for your host, so a partner with few resources gains from taking students.

Intercalating is optional. After year 3 you can take a year out of the medicine course to study one subject in depth and gain a BMSc (Hons), a Bachelor of Medical Sciences with honours. You then rejoin the MBChB in year 4, so the whole route takes six years instead of five.

The intercalated course pages, such as the one for Medical Education, ask that you have completed three years of a medical degree first. Dundee lists nine intercalated BMSc (Hons) subjects:

• Anatomy
• Cancer and Personalised Medicine
• General, Vascular and Academic Surgery
• Global Health
• Healthcare Improvement
• Human Reproduction, Assisted Conception and Embryonic Stem Cells
• Medical Education
• Metabolic Disease
• Neuroscience of Brain Health and Disease

The medical school building is inside Ninewells Hospital. It has a central open area called the Promenade, a reception and medical school office, the Wolfson lecture hall, where most medical school classes happen, and the Gannochy lecture theatre. The library is open 24 hours a day across two floors, with silent study areas and the Pippard IT suite.

The Clinical Skills Centre, on level 6 of Ninewells, is part of the Dundee Institute for Healthcare Simulation and has run simulation-based teaching since 1998. It has grown to three linked areas with nine clinical teaching rooms, a large seminar room and a resuscitation training room. It also has two large flexible teaching rooms, two self-directed learning rooms, a procedural skills room and an immersion room built to feel like an emergency department. Nursing students use it too.

Within the centre, the Dow Clinical Simulation Suite has three outpatient consultation rooms with a reception, a six-bed hospital ward and a high dependency area. The high dependency area recreates a ward for patients who need closer monitoring than a normal ward. It has audio-visual recording, a control room and debriefing space, so a simulation can be watched and talked through afterwards.

Teaching uses traditional simulators, augmented and virtual reality simulators, professional actors and a bank of volunteer simulated patients. Dundee has used volunteer simulated patients, people trained to act as patients, in its teaching since 1997.

The Surgical Skills Centre runs procedure-based courses for doctors at every stage of their career, and the MBChB course page lists it among the places you learn hands-on surgical procedures. It has laparoscopic (keyhole surgery) training labs, an operating theatre, micro-surgery microscopes, virtual reality simulators and surgical training on Thiel-embalmed bodies.

For your own study there is a digital resource library of animations, graphics, notes and custom medical illustrations, which students also contribute to.

The School of Medicine has its own Student Support Team, made up of professional services staff and Educational, Guidance and Support Tutors (EGSTs). They help with finance, withdrawing from the course, mitigating circumstances (problems that affected your studies or exams), visas, accommodation, adjustments, disability, mental health and academic skills. Meetings are one to one and confidential.

The team has links with services across the city campus, so it can refer you on to more specialist help. Dundee says support staff are available five days a week.

Exam support is built in. If you fail the MS AKT you get an automatic meeting with your year lead and the academic mentor team to prepare for the resit. If you fail the CPSA you are offered a meeting to go through your feedback and make an action plan. Results are not released on a Friday, for student support reasons.

Students also have a formal voice. When the GMC observed the Staff Student Liaison Committee in March 2021, it was chaired by the student School President, with representatives from every year. In the same review the GMC found the school's fitness to practise procedures, used when there are concerns about a student's health, conduct or professionalism, supportive, transparent and fair.