The Hertfordshire Medicine course

In Years 1 and 2, the Clinical Science years, each learning week is built around one clinical case. The case ties together three strands that the school calls curriculum themes: Basic Clinical Sciences, Professional Skills, and Patients, Populations and Society. The names describe the science, the practical skills, and the patient and public-health side of each case.

The curriculum is spiral. Key ideas and skills come back several times over the five years, each time in more depth and with more complex patients, which helps you remember them. Alongside group work there are lectures, expert tutorials, anatomy sessions, clinical and communication skills workshops and simulation. Separate sessions cover medical law and ethics, public health and evidence-based practice, and professionalism.

From Year 3 the balance shifts towards the workplace. Year 3 alternates PBL units on campus with clinical blocks, and each block includes a transition to practice element that continues the workplace learning begun in Years 1 and 2. In Years 4 and 5 you learn mainly on placement, supervised and assessed by clinicians at the placement sites. Each Year 4 block includes introductory lectures at the university.

Your teachers include practising doctors, bioscientists, medical researchers and other health professionals, as well as specialists in healthcare ethics, technology and education. Actors trained to play patients help you rehearse consultations, and real patients come in to talk about living with their conditions. Patients and members of the public, whom the school calls service users, are involved throughout the programme.

On average you will have 20 to 25 contact hours a week. Contact hours are timetabled teaching such as lectures, group sessions, skills classes and tutorials. Independent study and placement time come on top of this.

The university expects a full-time student to spend about 1,200 hours a year on study, and it publishes how that time splits in each year. The figures show a sharp change after Year 2, from a timetable led by taught sessions to one led by placement and self-directed work.

• Year 1: about 54% lectures, seminars, tutorials and practicals, 42% independent study and 3% placement.
• Year 2: about 54% taught sessions, 38% independent study and 6% placement.
• Year 3: about 15% taught sessions, 52% independent study and 32% placement.
• Year 4: about 6% taught sessions, 21% independent study and 71% placement.
• Year 5: about 1% taught sessions, 48% independent study and 49% placement.

Anatomy is part of the core science of Years 1 and 2. On the digital side you use the Anatomage table, a table-sized touchscreen built from real human bodies. You can remove tissue layer by layer on screen, explore structures in 3D and look at disease, such as a diseased lung.

You also study real human anatomy from plastinated specimens. Plastination replaces the water and fat in body tissue with plastic, so a specimen keeps its true structure and can be examined closely. The school holds 107 of them under a licence from the Human Tissue Authority, which regulates the use of human tissue for teaching in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Anatomical models and 3D printers complete the set-up. An organ scanned in the lab can be printed as a physical model for detailed study. Anatomy sessions count towards the small-group attendance you need to progress each year.

The university says students are patient-facing from the second term of Year 1. Year 1 includes the first block of what the school calls Early Years Clinical Experience (EYCE), and the programme specification sets out one two-week clinical attachment that year. Year 2 includes EYCE Blocks 2 and 3, with two further two-week attachments.

One of these early attachments is a two-week placement in general practice, taken in either Year 1 or Year 2. The school says first-year students observe GP consultations and take patient histories, which means asking patients about their symptoms, background and medicines. This replaced an earlier plan for separate three-day GP visits in each of Years 1 and 2.

Before and alongside these attachments you practise on campus with simulated patients and in the simulated ward. From Year 3, placements take up a much larger share of each year, as the placements section below sets out.

Each year of the course is a single 120-credit module, assessed in three domains, or areas: Professional Knowledge, Professional Skills and Becoming a Doctor. Exams and practical assessments are pass or fail, and the Becoming a Doctor domain is graded Acceptable, Borderline, Cause for Concern or Unacceptable. The MBBS carries no degree classification, such as a first or a 2:1. As the GMC requires, good marks elsewhere cannot make up for a failed module.

Professional Knowledge is tested by online written exams. Professional Skills is tested by Clinical Competency Assessments (CCAs), practical exams of your clinical and professional skills. Pass marks for both are set afresh each year using an internationally recognised standard-setting method, which takes account of how hard each exam is.

Becoming a Doctor covers professionalism and learning in the workplace. It draws on your attendance, a professional behaviour assessment, your SSCs and elective, and a portfolio of workplace-based assessments. These include case-based discussions, where you talk a supervisor through a patient you have seen, and the mini clinical evaluation exercise (Mini-CEX), where you are watched with a patient and given feedback. Direct observation of procedural skills (DOPS) checks practical procedures.

In Year 5 you take the Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA), which every UK medical graduate must pass to join the medical register. It has two parts, both run by your school to GMC requirements: the Applied Knowledge Test (AKT), an on-screen multiple-choice exam, and the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA), a practical exam. You must also pass the Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA), a national online exam that checks you can prescribe medicines safely, for example by writing prescriptions and calculating doses.

Attendance is part of the Becoming a Doctor domain. You must attend at least 80% of small-group teaching, such as CBL and PBL groups, skills sessions, anatomy, tutorials, clinical seminars and placements, and at least 50% of each type. Falling short of 80% can lead to a Cause for Concern grade, where a panel reviews your case, or an Unacceptable grade, which means repeating the year.

If you have not passed everything after the resit period, the Board of Examiners, the panel that confirms results, can let you repeat the year. You retake every assessment, including ones you passed. Repeating is allowed only once in the whole course and gives you one further attempt at the module. If any domain is still graded Unacceptable on that third attempt, you are withdrawn, possibly with an interim award (see the FAQs). Missing required placement hours can also mean repeating the year or leaving the course.

• A Borderline grade in Becoming a Doctor lets you progress once in the whole course. A second Borderline means repeating the year.
• A Cause for Concern grade in Becoming a Doctor at the end of the year means resitting assessments in the resit period.
• An Unacceptable grade in Becoming a Doctor means repeating the year and retaking the assessments in every domain.

Clinical placements are arranged by the university, and the MBBS programme team decides who goes where. Most placements are in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. The programme specification says they can also be in Essex and Cambridgeshire, and the university warns that locations may widen as the programme progresses, so you need to be flexible.

Placement time rises steeply: about 2 weeks in Year 1, 4 in Year 2, 15 in Year 3 and 40 in Year 4. Year 5 has about 35 weeks, a figure that includes the student selected component. The number of placement days a week varies with the setting, your stage and the rota. Some placements involve early starts, evenings, nights or weekends.

Most placement sites can be reached by public transport, but journey times vary. The university estimates travel will cost up to an average of £1,000 a year. In Years 3 to 5 some placements are further away. If you cannot reach one from home in reasonable time, you are expected to find temporary accommodation nearby; the university's example budget is £50 a night, or £1,250 for a five-week block.

Students with a disability, as defined by the Equality Act 2010, get reasonable adjustments and priority arrangements in placement allocation. On placement you are supported by the university's clinical lead, academic placement lead and clinical link tutors, and by educational and clinical supervisors at the placement providers.

Student Selected Components (SSCs) are parts of the course where you choose the topic, so you can explore an area that interests you in more depth. You complete one in Year 1, one in Year 2 (called SSC1) and a five-week SSC F in Year 5. They are assessed within the Becoming a Doctor domain.

The elective is a five-week placement in Year 5, again shaped around your interests. It can be taken abroad if you are eligible and choose to. You would then pay for travel, accommodation, vaccinations, insurance and any passport or visa costs, and some host institutions charge an administration fee. The university's rough estimate for final-year SSC and elective costs is £1,000.

Intercalating means taking an extra year out of the medical course to study for another qualification. At Hertfordshire it is optional. Once you have passed Years 1 to 3, you can apply to spend an extra year between Years 4 and 5. You would study for an MSc, a master's degree, in any subject area at the University of Hertfordshire.

Intercalating would make your time at medical school six years instead of five, and you would return to join the final year afterwards.

You will be based in the Hertfordshire Medical School building on the College Lane campus in Hatfield. It is an existing university building of about 2,000 square metres, refurbished for medicine between autumn 2025 and autumn 2026. It has classrooms and tutorial spaces for group work, and you also have access to the university's lecture theatres.

The simulated ward has six beds, high-fidelity mannequins and critical care equipment. High-fidelity mannequins are life-size models that can mimic signs such as breathing and heart sounds. Two immersive skill rooms can recreate settings such as an operating theatre or an emergency department, and the building also has virtual and augmented reality equipment.

The building also has a virtual anatomy lab, and its digital anatomy facilities include the Anatomage table. College Lane has a Learning Resources Centre open 24 hours a day, a 24-hour gym and student halls. A new Health Building for the university's other health courses is due to open on College Lane in 2028.

You get a personal tutor who stays with you through to graduation and is an important point of contact for understanding the course and the school. There is an induction at the start of the programme and at the start of each year; in 2026 it ran for three weeks to give new students extra support. International students also get an overseas orientation and an enhanced induction programme.

Each year of the course has its own academic lead, clinical skills lead, communication lead and SSC lead. The School of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences has an Academic Skills Unit, and the university runs Student Success Hubs, including a maths drop-in centre. You keep a Personal Development Plan, a record of your progress and goals, throughout the course.

The school has its own safeguarding lead. Student representatives sit on the programme's academic experience group, where students feed back on the course. Medical students are guaranteed campus accommodation for all five years, as long as they meet application deadlines and their personal needs can be met.