The Edinburgh Medicine course

The degree is organised around twelve outcome themes, which set out what you should be able to do by graduation. Among them are clinical communication, emergency care and resuscitation, clinical pharmacology and therapeutics, and your legal and professional duties as a doctor.

Years 1 and 2 are taught mainly on campus, through lectures, seminars, tutorials, online material and practical sessions. The school describes the MBChB as a spiral curriculum, meaning you come back to the same themes in later years rather than finishing with them, each time with harder cases and more responsibility.

Year 1 carries about 279 hours of lectures, 207 hours of seminars and tutorials and 44 hours of supervised practicals inside a notional 1,200-hour year, with the rest left to your own reading. Year 2 cuts lectures to about 90 while keeping the tutorial load. By year 4 there are about 85 lecture hours against 746 hours on placement, and year 6 lists no lecture hours at all.

The course is assessed on how you behave as well as what you know. Every year has a professionalism requirement covering attendance, engagement and conduct, judged against the GMC's four domains of good practice, and concerns are dealt with supportively unless they are serious or repeated.

Edinburgh publishes a sample week from the first semester of year 1. Monday is campus-based: an anatomy lecture in the morning, a short lecture at lunchtime, then a research and evidence-based medicine tutorial and a group based learning tutorial.

Tuesday you travel out to a general practice for a tutorial on the social and ethical strand, then come back for a clinical communication tutorial and an anatomy practical. Wednesday afternoon is a three-hour clinical skills session. Thursday brings an ethics lecture, a tutorial and another group based learning slot, and Friday two anatomy lectures and a lecture linking knowledge to clinical practice.

That is a little under twenty hours of timetabled teaching, with the rest of the year given to directed and independent study. The school says the course leaves little room for a part-time job, and that years 4 to 6 demand more time again.

Anatomy sits inside the biomedicine strand in years 1 and 2. You learn the structure of each body system alongside its physiology and the common diseases that affect it. It is taught through lectures and practical sessions in the anatomy teaching laboratory at Teviot Place.

You are examined on it separately. Both year 1 and year 2 end with an anatomy spot test held in that laboratory. A spot test is a timed circuit in which you move from station to station identifying what is in front of you. It is worth 15 per cent of the year and is a standalone hurdle: you have to pass it on its own to move up.

The anatomy department teaches using bodies donated by members of the public, under the Anatomy Act 1984 and the Human Tissue (Scotland) Act 2006. Anatomical examination of a donation can take up to three years, and the university holds a memorial service each April at the McEwan Hall.

You meet patients in year 1, though in small amounts and in structured settings rather than on wards. You travel to a general practice for tutorials, you do community-based practicals, and patient volunteers come in to talk to first years about living with their condition.

Year 2 is where you start doing rather than watching. The strand linking knowledge to clinical practice introduces history taking and physical examination, and you need your own stethoscope from the start of the year. The year ends with your first Objective Structured Clinical Examination, or OSCE: a circuit of short timed stations, each watched by an examiner.

Year 4 then puts you into hospitals and GP surgeries full time, embedded in a team rather than visiting one, and the expectation rises each year after that.

Written papers at Edinburgh are called knowledge tests and are sat on university computers. They mix single best answer questions, where you pick one option from a list, with very short answer questions where you type a brief response.

In years 4, 5 and 6 you also sit two practice knowledge tests online each year, known as progress tests. You must sit them, but you do not have to pass them and they do not count towards your result.

Practical exams are OSCEs, and years 2, 4 and 5 each end with one. From year 5 you must pass at least half the individual stations as well as reaching the overall pass mark. In years 4 and 5 the written papers carry 70 per cent of the year and the OSCE 30. In year 6 the written and clinical finals count for half each.

Finals are the Medical Licensing Assessment, or MLA, which every UK medical student must now pass to get a licence to practise. It has two parts, both run by your own medical school. Edinburgh's applied knowledge test is the version shared between UK medical schools: two computer papers of 100 single best answer questions, sat on consecutive days, two hours each. The pass mark is set nationally at the standard of a doctor in their first week of work.

The clinical half of the MLA is Edinburgh's final OSCE, which the GMC judged compliant with its requirements in April 2024. It is a 24-station exam split into two sequences of twelve, each taken as six stations a day over two days. Stations last ten minutes with two minutes of reading time.

In that design, every station is marked on the same four equally weighted areas, one of which is professionalism. To pass you need the overall pass mark, a pass in at least half of the stations, and at least 50 per cent in each of the four areas across the whole exam.

• Anatomy spot tests in years 1 and 2 must each be passed on their own, whatever your other marks
• Fail the knowledge test in year 1 or year 2 and you can resit it in August. If you still do not meet the progression rules, you can repeat the year once.
• Fail finals and there is one resit: April for the written papers, May for the clinical exam. Fail a resit and you can repeat year 6 in full as a second attempt.
• In the finals design the GMC approved in 2024, students resitting the clinical exam had their assistantship and elective cut from six weeks to four each, to leave time for revision.

Clinical teaching happens in the Edinburgh teaching hospitals, in GP surgeries across south-east Scotland and in hospitals further afield. Edinburgh Medical School names four teaching hospitals: the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, the Western General Hospital, the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People, and St John's Hospital in Livingston.

Placements away from the city are called peripheral placements. The school pays a travel subsidy in years 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 and provides accommodation at most peripheral sites. If you travel 20 miles or more each way with no accommodation on site, you can claim travel expenses through NHS funding for teaching.

The school publishes the dates of every clinical block for the year: ten four-week blocks in year 4, seven five-week blocks in year 5, and four four-week blocks before finals in year 6.

Student selected components, usually shortened to SSCs, are parts of the course you choose yourself. Year 1 has one: a group project that ends in a poster and a scientific abstract. Year 5 has a Broadening Medical Experience block, which you use to develop clinically, professionally or academically in an area that interests you.

Year 5 also carries student selected component 5, a teaching project every student does. With other students, you plan and deliver a piece of teaching to fellow medical students or to a group outside the university. You then write a 1,000-word reflection, which three other students grade as pass or unsatisfactory before a member of staff confirms or changes the grade.

The largest is the elective, student selected component 6. It is compulsory, sits at the end of year 6 after finals, lasts six weeks, and you arrange it yourself. Many students go abroad and are attached to a hospital; the school lists Ghana, Ethiopia, South Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, India, Samoa and the United States among the common destinations.

There are also formal exchange partnerships, with the University of Sydney, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Weill Cornell Medicine.

Intercalation means pausing medicine to take a separate degree. At Edinburgh it is not an add-on you apply for. It is simply year 3: every student who joins without a degree takes a Bachelor of Medical Sciences honours year as part of the MBChB.

You rank the honours programmes in order of preference after year 2, and places are then allocated randomly among the students who want them. Around 25 programmes run. Laboratory options include biochemistry, cell biology, genetics and immunology. Others are clinical or population-based, such as epidemiology and health sciences, or humanities-leaning, such as bioethics law and society and literature and medicine.

A separate route exists for students who want research at the centre of their career. At the end of year 4 a few are selected to leave the MBChB for a three-year PhD, then return to finish the degree, so it runs to nine years. This is the TRACC programme, short for To Train and Retain Academic Cancer Clinicians. It is funded by Cancer Research UK and run jointly by Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Edinburgh also takes intercalating students from other medical schools onto a subset of its BMedSci programmes.

The medical school's headquarters is the Chancellor's Building on the BioQuarter campus at Little France, next door to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. It holds lecture theatres, seminar rooms, library and computing space, and the Clinical Skills Centre on its first floor.

The Clinical Skills Centre is where most hands-on practice happens. It has a four-bedded simulated ward with manikins on clinical monitoring, and a separate simulation room with a full-body SimMan manikin, a drug cupboard, piped gas and a surgical scrub sink. Cameras let sessions be observed, and further rooms are set aside for debriefs and communication skills teaching.

Two large teaching rooms hold part-task trainers, which are models of a single body part used to practise one procedure at a time. There is also a Harvey cardiopulmonary trainer, a full-size manikin that simulates many different heart conditions.

Beyond the city centre, the Medical Education Centre at the Western General Hospital has its own clinical skills area and computer labs, and hospital libraries are open to you on most sites.

You are assigned a student adviser who stays your named contact for the whole degree, which matters on a six-year course where you move between campuses and hospitals. They are the first person to go to with a problem, and they can open direct access to university counselling. If you would rather not speak to your own adviser, you can email the Student Support Manager.

Day to day, your programme administrator handles attendance, absence, timetables and teaching materials, and can point you towards special circumstances or an interruption of studies. Six administrators work on the MBChB inside the Medical Teaching Organisation, the office that runs the programme.

A Student Support team sits behind both, running wellbeing initiatives and a student ambassador scheme alongside the university-wide wellbeing services.