The Glasgow Medicine course

Teaching mixes whole-year lectures with a lot of small-group work. Lectures usually run for an hour, and some are recorded so you can watch them again. Around them sit problem-based learning groups, laboratory and dissection classes, clinical skills sessions and, from year 3, case-based learning with a clinical tutor.

The balance shifts as you move up. In years 1 and 2 you are on campus for most of the week, with occasional sessions in a GP practice or a hospital. Year 3 starts with a campus semester of pathology and clinical science, then turns into full-time placement in January. Years 4 and 5 are almost entirely placement.

Academic days are timetabled teaching days inside the clinical years. In year 4 in 2026-27 each four-week specialty block has one, usually a Friday. They exist because a short block cannot cover a specialty by chance alone, so a lecture and small-group programme fills the gaps that the wards leave.

Online material carries part of the load. Moodle, the university virtual learning environment, holds lecture recordings, self-test quizzes and coursework submission. Clinical skills podcasts and filmed examination teaching back up the practical sessions, and year 2 timetables about two hours of live online teaching and two to three hours of recorded material each week.

Year 1 is timetabled at about 13 hours of direct contact a week. That is three to five one-hour lectures, two one-hour problem-based learning sessions, one three-hour laboratory or seminar session and one three-hour vocational studies session. Clinical skills sessions are added on top and last one to one and a half hours.

The year group is split into three cohorts for small-group teaching, labs and clinical skills, and comes back together for lectures. Your individual timetable therefore differs from your friends. The rest of the week is yours, for reading, preparing PBL objectives and working through Moodle workbooks.

Year 2 is timetabled differently. A week holds about five to six hours of lectures and labs on campus, two hours of live online teaching and two to three hours of recorded online material. Add one two-hour PBL session and one three-hour vocational skills session.

In the first semester of year 3 a week is built from lectures and case-based learning tutorials. Hospital half days and general practice days fall at set points in the term rather than every week. The 2018 programme guide also describes a weekly conference where pathologists, microbiologists and biochemists pull one case apart together, so treat that detail as dated.

• The school says it expects most Wednesday afternoons to be kept free, in whole or in part, for sport and other activities.
• In year 1 in 2026-27, teaching runs from 21 September, with exam weeks in mid-December and early June and resits in late July.

Glasgow teaches anatomy with donated bodies. Dissection means your group works on a body yourselves; prosection means studying parts that someone else has already dissected for teaching. Glasgow runs dissection classes in the Laboratory of Human Anatomy, and the school has said it has no plans to move away from cadaveric dissection under the new curriculum.

It starts in year 1. After three weeks on tissues, cells, immunology and basic physiology, the first semester follows an anatomy core from weeks 4 to 11. That means one anatomy laboratory session a week, a workbook to complete in your own time and a feedback session each week to check you are keeping up.

In phase 2, which runs from the second half of year 1 through year 2, anatomy follows the body systems and dissection classes are weekly. Embryology and development are taught alongside, and three-dimensional imaging is used to show what normal looks like.

Imaging runs as a thread beside the dissection. Year 1 covers anatomical terms, the normal chest x-ray and cross-sectional scans. Year 3 moves on to interpreting plain films through the same kind of image viewing system the hospitals use, and the clinical years add the imaging that belongs to each specialty.

Bodies come from a donation programme run under the Anatomy Act 1984 and the Human Tissue (Scotland) Act 2006, and the university holds an annual memorial service for donors and their families. The Anatomy Facility also houses the Clinical Anatomy Skills Centre and the Museum of Anatomy.

You meet patients in your first year, but in small doses. Vocational and professional studies takes your group out to a GP practice with your tutor: five such sessions in year 1 and four in year 2, with four to eight students on each visit. The same group goes into hospital four times, to a non-acute ward and to an emergency department, twice in November and twice around the turn of April and May. Each visit lasts about two hours, and you talk in pairs to patients about what being in hospital is like.

Clinical skills start at the same time. Year 1 covers pulse, blood pressure, temperature and breathing rate, handwashing, taking blood, giving injections and basic life support. It also has two three-hour sessions on examining the heart and lungs, in groups of four or five in the Wolfson Medical School Building, in late February and mid-March. Year 2 works through examination of the heart, chest, abdomen, nervous system and joints, and adds blood glucose and insulin, urine testing and peak flow, in sessions of the same length and size.

Year 1 coursework pushes you towards real people rather than textbooks. The Life History Project follows one patient over time. The Community Diagnosis Project sends a team to investigate a health issue in an allocated community. In year 2 the Family Project runs across both semesters.

Year 3 is the step up. In the first semester the school's 2026-27 placement guide gives you three half days in hospital, each with a clinical teaching fellow, a doctor in a post built around teaching students. Every half day is split between teaching at the bedside and small-group work on chest pain, breathlessness or abdominal pain. The systems covered are the heart, the lungs and the gut.

General practice in that semester is four days between September and December, in a group of two to four. You run student-led surgeries, take blood, give injections, and talk to at least one patient living with several long-term conditions.

From January of year 3 you are on full-time clinical placement, and you stay there for the rest of the course.

Every year has exams you must pass to move up. You need a grade D or better in every course, there is no compensation between courses, and some courses contain components you must pass separately. In year 1 that means passing the written exam, the coursework and the MILE each on their own.

Written papers are mostly single best answer questions, where you choose the one best option from a short list. Year 3 has two papers of 75 questions and year 4 has two of 100. OSCEs run in years 3, 4 and 5, with actors and volunteer patients playing the parts so that every student meets the same case.

Finals are the Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA), which every UK medical school now has to include. It has two parts: the Applied Knowledge Test, which is written, and the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment, which is practical. The GMC judged both of the Glasgow parts compliant with its requirements in June 2024.

Glasgow described its clinical exam to the GMC as an OSCE of 16 stations, each ten minutes long with a minute of reading time, taken four stations a day across four days. You have to reach the pass standard overall and pass at least three quarters of the stations. The resit runs as eight stations a day over two days. Under the new curriculum the school plans to hold both MLA parts in February, which leaves room for a resit without delaying graduation.

On placement, assessment never stops. Your educational supervisor watches you with a patient (a mini clinical evaluation exercise), discusses a case you were involved in (a case-based discussion) and signs an end of block assessment. The placement guide sets a minimum of two of those exercises and one discussion per block, though its own table asks for fewer in musculoskeletal medicine, oncology, frailty, cardiology and neurology. It all goes into the Glasgow Undergraduate Medical ePortfolio, modelled on the portfolio that foundation doctors keep.

Attendance is not optional. The regulations require full attendance at every part of the programme, and persistent absence can become a fitness to practise matter. If you do not pass the MLA at the end of year 5, one repeat of the final year is granted automatically, and four unsuccessful attempts at the final-year assessments means exclusion.

• To graduate you must also complete every clinical attachment in years 3 to 5, finish the preparation for practice block, normally complete both electives, and be assessed as competent in resuscitation.
• Resuscitation competence normally has to be reached within two attempts by the end of year 5, and missing the training without an approved reason counts as a failed attempt.
• The ten-week medicine block uses an objective long case instead of the mini clinical evaluation exercise and case-based discussion for the second half of the attachment. The school's guidance for supervisors still places that block in year 4; under the new curriculum it sits in year 5.
• In that long case your assessor watches you take a history and examine a patient for up to 40 minutes. You then spend 15 to 20 minutes on your summary, differential diagnosis, investigations and management plan, and 5 to 10 minutes on feedback.
• Resit weeks are timetabled every year, and in 2026-27 the final-year resits for both MLA parts fall in late May and early June.
• Several blocks also need written portfolio cases: junior medicine, junior surgery, general practice, psychiatry, obstetrics and gynaecology, and musculoskeletal medicine. Each is a full history, examination and plan plus a reflective piece of 500 to 1500 words, checked for plagiarism.
• A block lead or supervisor can award a certificate of merit for strong work on the ward rather than in the library. It does not change your degree, and merits are handed over at graduation.
• If you miss part of a block, or fall short on it, you remediate, usually in the summer vacation. Finishing a failed block comes before an elective, so a bad block can cost you elective time.

From the middle of year 3 you are attached to a specific hospital. You get a base ward, an educational supervisor and a short curriculum for that attachment, and the block ends with an assessment your supervisor completes. Placement timetables and allocations are issued to you by the medical school rather than chosen by you.

The network is wide. The course page counts around 25 hospitals and 150 general practices across Glasgow and the west of Scotland. An older school page, last updated in 2018, puts the practice figure nearer 200 and says more than 30 per cent of clinical teaching happens outside NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde.

That means travelling, and sometimes staying away. NHS Ayrshire and Arran offers student accommodation at University Hospital Crosshouse and University Hospital Ayr. Places are limited and need at least two weeks notice, and students who commute instead can claim travel costs. Some teaching only happens outside Glasgow: the clinical skills programme lists the acutely ill patient course and simulation training as running at Kirklands and the Ayrshire hospitals.

General practice is not a token block. For the early-year teaching the school recruits tutors and practices from NHS Ayrshire and Arran, NHS Forth Valley, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Lanarkshire. For the four-week general practice block in year 4 it also uses NHS Highland and NHS Dumfries and Galloway. Practices host students in every year of the course.

None of this starts until you are cleared. The university's rules say you cannot register for the year, enrol on classes or go on clinical placement until the school's requirements are met. Those include membership of the Protection of Vulnerable Groups Scheme, which is the Scottish criminal records check, plus health screening and immunisation including hepatitis B.

There are rules before you set foot on a ward. Clinical areas run a bare below the elbows policy: short sleeves, no watch, no jewellery, no tie, no white coat, hair tied back and short clean nails. The school recommends buying the university medical student scrubs to wear on every placement. Ten short online infection prevention modules, part of a national Scottish pathway, have to be done before year 3 placements begin.

Glasgow builds in three student selected components (SSCs) and two electives. An SSC is a block of four or five weeks where you choose the subject. It can be a research project, a deeper look at something from the core course, or something outside medicine such as a language. They fall in years 2, 3 and 4.

In year 2 you pick from a menu. From year 3 you can propose your own, and many students do. A general practice SSC places you in a practice two days a week for five weeks, with a self-directed learning package and a presentation to the practice at the end. The year 4 component has to carry at least 60 per cent written assessment.

Electives are different in purpose: they are about experience rather than study in depth. The junior elective sits in the summer after year 4 and can run from two to eight weeks, with four recommended. The senior elective comes in year 5 after preparation for practice, lasts four weeks and must contain 16 to 20 teaching days.

You can go anywhere offering a recognised clinical specialty, including general practice and public health. The school programme guide published in 2018 says about half of each year group takes an elective abroad. Students arrange their own placements: the school states this plainly for general practice electives, and an overseas senior elective often needs planning a year ahead. Both electives are normally needed to graduate.

• The year 3 general practice menu covers deep end patients, frailty and care of the elderly, multimorbidity and treatment burden, realistic medicine, and LGBTQI and intersectionality. Deep end means the practices serving Scotland's most deprived areas. COMET labels the last option equality, diversity, inclusion and intersectionality.
• The year 4 general practice menu covers adolescent health, clinical reasoning, deep end general practice, gender based violence and leadership.

Intercalating means pausing medicine for a year to take a degree in something else, then returning. At Glasgow it is optional and competitive, and it happens after year 3. Selection uses your exam results so far, and popular subjects fill up, so you are asked to name alternatives.

The one-year BSc (Med Sci) in Clinical Medicine has the same shape whatever subject you pick: a core course in research methods, a statistics course, a specialist course and a research project. Specialist subjects include oncology, cardiovascular studies, critical care and perioperative medicine, global health, inflammation medicine, ear nose and throat surgery, psychological medicine, public health, and women's and children's health.

Life sciences options include anatomical sciences, biochemistry, genetics, microbiology, molecular and cellular biology and pharmacology. The College of Arts and Humanities runs medical humanities, which takes between one and ten students a year. A two-year honours degree is also available.

The project is the heart of it, and the pattern depends on the route. On the clinical medicine BSc it takes one day a week before Christmas, then at least three days a week from Christmas to Easter. You write it up as a research paper with an abstract, a poster and a talk. A life sciences project instead runs three days a week across ten weeks of semester one, with the report assessed in semester two.

For the clinical medicine BSc the school suggests you should normally be in the top half of the year with good academic progress. Places on particular specialist courses are limited and go on performance so far.

Intercalating at another university is possible, but only with permission from the head of the undergraduate medical school and only if your ranking would have won you a Glasgow place anyway. Scottish funding treats the year as your one spare year of tuition support, which matters if you later need to repeat a year.

The Wolfson Medical School Building on University Avenue is home for the first two years. It holds lecture theatres, teaching rooms, the Walton Library and Resource Centre, which is open around the clock, a cafe and the MicroMuseum of two hundred years of health care.

The clinical skills area is a purpose-built space for practising clinical and communication skills. It includes a fully equipped ward where you work in a simulated setting before meeting real patients. Dissection happens in the Laboratory of Human Anatomy, part of the university's Anatomy Facility.

Clinical teaching has two hubs. The New Lister Building at Glasgow Royal Infirmary is the refurbished teaching centre in the city centre. The Teaching and Learning Centre at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital serves the hospital that opened on that site in 2015, and its rooms are also used for timetabled university teaching.

Every student has an Adviser of Studies, named on the student record system, and the medical school runs its own student support team you can email or ring. On placement your educational supervisor is the first person to take a timetable or academic problem to, and your year lead comes after that.

Peer support is built in from the start. You are allocated a peer mentor before you arrive and meet your mentor group during integration week. A student support poster the school published in 2022 also lists a student-run peer support network, the British Medical Association doctor adviser service and the MedChir Glasgow society.

The support team's office is in the Wolfson building, off the library, and it offers meetings in person or by video four days a week. Time with them counts as an authorised absence from a placement. Every student has to be registered with a GP.

The school's wellbeing pages point you to university counselling and psychological services, which you can refer yourself to. They also list Glasgow University Nightline, a student-run listening service, plus Breathing Space, NHS 24 and the Samaritans. The university runs a separate service for sexual violence and harassment.

If you need adjustments on placement, university disability services can write a study support plan. The school can also give you a wallet-sized adjustment passport that sums it up for the staff you meet on a ward. The placement guide adds that if you see anything putting patients, staff or students at risk, you have a professional duty to report it. You take that to your educational supervisor, or to the nearest responsible qualified NHS staff member if it is urgent.

Direct entrants into year 3 get extra help. There is a transition coordinator, an effective learning adviser and an introductory week before phase 3. A scheme called MedFamily pairs each new arrival with a current student who helps them settle in.