The Edge Hill Medicine course

Teaching combines lectures, seminars, science practicals, clinical skills and simulation sessions, tutorials and placements in local healthcare settings. In Years 1 and 2 the main approach is a hybrid of case-based learning (CBL) and team-based learning (TBL). Both put you in small groups solving problems, so you practise the questioning and reasoning a doctor uses rather than only memorising facts.

The curriculum is non-modular, which means there are no separate modules that you pass one at a time. In Year 1 you still work through the body one system at a time, from the heart and lungs to the gut and brain. A student profiled by Edge Hill says specialist doctors teach their own system, so a cardiologist teaches the heart.

Alongside the body systems, 16 themes run across all five years. They range from applying biomedical science and prescribing safely to safeguarding, which means protecting vulnerable patients from harm. Others cover leadership, the law and how the health services of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland work.

From Year 3 the balance shifts to placements at your home trust, with consolidation weeks on campus in between. Your teachers include doctors from medical and surgical specialties, mental health and primary care staff, biomedical scientists, psychologists, sociologists, public health specialists, legal experts, nurses and pharmacists. Patients, carers and senior clinicians also teach specialist topics.

You also learn with students from other health courses, which is called interprofessional learning. When the GMC visited in January 2025 it found this well embedded on placement, where students join ward rounds and team meetings with nurses, midwives and other staff. The wider faculty also runs larger joint events on campus, but in 2024/25 changes to the nursing course made these harder to timetable. The school told the GMC it still had work to do here.

Contact hours change from week to week, but you should expect to be in five days a week. Teaching can be timetabled on any day, although Wednesday afternoons are normally kept free for sport and cultural activities.

Your first-week timetable usually arrives at the end of August, and you get the rest of the year's timetable during your first week. From Year 3 most weeks are spent on placement, broken up by consolidation weeks back on campus.

Year 1 concentrates on the normal structure and function of the whole body, taught system by system. Anatomy then continues as one of the threads that run from Year 1 to Year 5, and a student profiled by Edge Hill says the same teachers take it each year. In its 2024/25 report the GMC noted that the school was strengthening several of these threads, including anatomy, pharmacology, and immunology and microbiology.

The faculty's Clinical Skills and Simulation Centre, which all its health and social care courses use, has an anatomy and ultrasound room with two Anatomage tables. These are 3D visualisation systems that work as virtual dissection tables: you cut through the body layer by layer on screen to reveal each structure. They also hold CT and MRI scans, so you can link anatomy to the images doctors use to spot disease.

The same room has two ultrasound scanners. They show organs such as the liver, gall bladder and pancreas, and moving structures such as tendons and blood flowing through arteries and veins. The centre's own page presents this technology as part of a wider move away from dissection.

Clinical learning starts in Year 1, with an early focus on community health settings. A student profiled on Edge Hill's website describes Year 1 as a series of one-day placements across the health system, from mental health services to home-care services.

Year 2 brings more clinical exposure in general practices and hospitals. The same student describes four one-week placements in general practice, psychiatry, general medicine and general surgery, including a first visit to an operating theatre.

From Year 3 you are mostly on placement at your home trust, caring for specific patient groups in hospital and community settings. By Year 5 you work as an apprentice to the team, taking on more and more responsibility for patients under supervision.

You are assessed through research projects and written assignments, written exams and OSCEs. In an OSCE you move through timed stations. Each station sets a task, such as taking a history or examining a patient, while an examiner marks you. Your skills and professionalism are also assessed on placement and through a portfolio.

You must pass every assessment component in a year to move on to the next. Professionalism is assessed throughout the course and recorded on a dashboard reviewed by a Professionalism Assessment Panel. You must pass every part of it, including your workplace-based assessments, before you can sit the final licensing exams.

Since 2024-25, every UK medical graduate has had to pass the GMC's Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA). At Edge Hill you sit both parts in Year 5. The Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) is the national written exam set by the Medical Schools Council: two computer-based papers of 100 single best answer questions, where you pick the most appropriate of several options. Each paper lasts two hours, and you sit them on consecutive days.

The Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA) is Edge Hill's own final OSCE. As designed in 2024, when the GMC accepted it before the school had run one, it has 12 stations over two days. Each lasts 12 minutes with two minutes' reading time and uses simulated patients, people trained to play patients. To pass you need a high enough overall score and must pass at least two-thirds of the stations.

Final-year students also take the Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA), a national online test of safe prescribing. In January 2025 the first final-year students told the GMC they had not felt well prepared for it, because pharmacology from Year 1 had not carried into the clinical years. They said a new pharmacology lecturer had improved things, and also named infectious diseases, dermatology and haematology as thinly covered.

You can normally repeat a year only once in Years 1 to 4. An extra repeat of Year 5 may be allowed to give you two further attempts at the MLA.

All placements are in the North West of England. You pay your own travel and parking costs on placement. In 2024/25 the GMC noted that the university offered students a travel bursary, and that eligible students could claim NHS travel and accommodation support in their fifth year of study. You are given scrubs when a placement calls for them.

Placements are managed through InPlace, the faculty's online placement system, which you can check at any time from on or off campus.

In Years 1 and 2 placements are short and varied, in community services, general practices and hospitals. From Year 3 you are placed at one of two home trusts until you graduate. In January 2025 MWL was hosting 45 Edge Hill students, 11 of them in Year 5, and had committed to taking half of new Edge Hill students in future.

Your home trust is your base, not your only site. You still go to specialist centres for some topics, such as neurology, and to GP surgeries and mental health services. Mental health educators told the GMC that students learn in clinics, on wards and by shadowing in the community.

At MWL each educational supervisor the GMC met looked after up to three Edge Hill students, usually one each from Years 3, 4 and 5. MWL educators said three years on one site gives students time to catch up on anything missed. Final-year students at WWL said their learning outcomes were largely achievable, but that finding the chances to meet them was mostly up to them.

The main choice built into the early years is your Year 2 voluntary organisation placement. You research and arrange a placement with a charity or community group, where you work in a team, practise communicating with service users and see how people experience health outside the NHS.

In Years 1 to 3 you can apply for a four-week summer research internship in August, working 37 hours a week with an Edge Hill research team on one of its projects. In 2026 there were ten places, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), the government-funded body that pays for health research. Each came with a stipend, a payment to live on, of about £1,889.

To apply you must have passed all of that year's summative assessments, the exams that count towards moving up a year, and have no outstanding professionalism concerns. Students profiled by Edge Hill describe screening studies for systematic reviews, which gather all the research on a question, and analysing data. One project looked at children's experiences of having blood tests.

An elective is a placement you arrange yourself, often abroad. A graduate profiled on Edge Hill's website describes spending her Year 4 elective in primary care on Vancouver Island, Canada.

Intercalating means taking a year out of your medical degree to earn another qualification. At Edge Hill you can apply to do this between Year 3 and Year 4. You spend 12 months, from September to the end of August, on a master's degree at Edge Hill, then rejoin the MBChB at the start of Year 4.

You can choose a Masters by Research (MRes), which is built around a research project, or one of six other master's courses. These are MSc Public Health Nutrition, MSc Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Wellbeing, MSc Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, and MSc Sport, Physical Activity and Mental Health. The others are MSc Psychology (Conversion) and MA Education (Children and Young People's Mental Health).

To be considered you must have passed all your Year 3 summative assessments and have no outstanding professionalism concerns. Places are limited. Edge Hill says every successful applicant receives a stipend of £19,162 over the 12 months, paid monthly and funded by the NIHR.

You rejoin Year 4 whatever the result of your master's. The final deadline is the end of August and Year 4 starts in the first week of September, so the school advises finishing by mid-August to get a break. You can apply for both an intercalation and a summer internship, but only one can succeed, and the intercalation takes priority.

The £14m Faculty of Health and Social Care building in Ormskirk has ten teaching rooms, an 860-seat lecture theatre and social learning spaces. A student profiled on Edge Hill's site says her lectures are held there.

The Clinical Skills and Simulation Centre recreates settings from a patient's home to an operating theatre. It has a ward with piped air that acts as oxygen for deteriorating-patient scenarios, and an operating theatre used for teamwork and communication scenarios. There are also consultation rooms and a large skills space. Its trainers cover airway care, taking blood, abdominal examination and arterial blood gases, a blood sample from an artery that shows how well the lungs are working.

Twelve small debrief rooms let several scenarios run at once. Students watching on screens then join a guided debrief with those who took part. Full-body simulators of all ages breathe and have pulses and heart and lung sounds, and staff voice them from a control room. The first floor has eight OSCE bays and five consultation rooms for exams.

The Better at Home suite is a flat used for home-care scenarios. It was built in collaboration with Alder Hey Children's Hospital for the WellChild charity, to teach parents how to care for children after they leave hospital. Members of the public and service users play patients in sessions, adding realism and feedback.

The centre is busy. In January 2025 the GMC heard that rising student numbers across the faculty had pushed the simulated skills suite past capacity. The Medical School was looking at other sites to ease the pressure.

In Years 1 and 2 your main academic and pastoral contact is a personal academic tutor on campus. From Year 3 the educational supervisor at your home trust takes over, and stays with you until you graduate. The GMC expected this change to help with placement problems that campus tutors could not always solve. The course page still lists contact with your personal tutor as part of the consolidation weeks on campus.

The school has a Senior Academic Lead for Student Wellbeing and Support. It has separated its health and wellbeing committee from its conduct committee, which staff told the GMC had increased students' attendance and engagement. Its October 2023 admissions supplement also names a Disability Liaison Lead and an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead.

When the GMC visited in January 2025, a 24/7 student helpline and a flexible leave policy for medical students were about to be introduced. Final-year students also had a voluntary MLA club: twice-weekly evening revision sessions on Microsoft Teams, recorded and shared online. Students said it had helped their learning a great deal.