The Hull York (HYMS) Medicine course

The curriculum is integrated, which means subjects are not taught in separate blocks. The school's assessment rules group the summative exams into three themes. Applied Life Sciences is the science of how the body works and goes wrong. Clinical Skills and Reasoning covers consultations, examination and diagnosis, and Health, Society, Professionalism and Ethics covers ethics, professional behaviour and the social side of health.

In Phase I you are on campus at Hull or York. The current PBL case sets the agenda, and lectures, workshops, anatomy sessions, clinical and communication skills classes and a regular placement are arranged around it. Much of the learning is self-directed: you research the questions your group has set, then bring what you found back to the next session.

In Phase II and Phase III the balance moves to hospital wards and GP surgeries. You still have seminars, teaching sessions and clinical skills practice, but these take place in teaching facilities inside each placement hospital. Clinical reasoning workshops run through Phase II, and communication masterclasses taught by GPs and hospital doctors continue in years 3, 4 and 5.

Attendance is part of the course requirements. The school's training agreement for 2026-27 says you are expected to attend from 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday. Placements count as full-time, and on placement you will occasionally work evenings and weekends.

In April 2026 the school published accounts from two Phase I students, one based in Hull and one in York, describing their weeks. The school notes that individual accounts may not apply to every student. Both describe the same cycle, built around one PBL case that runs from a Thursday to the following Monday.

From year 3 the week is organised around full-time placements instead, as described in the year-by-year section below.

• Thursday: the new PBL case is introduced. The group picks out the key issues and sets learning objectives, with members taking roles such as chair or scribe. The Hull student also had clinical skills and anatomy that day, making it her busiest.
• Friday: lectures linked to the case. The Hull student said these were sometimes given in Hull and sometimes streamed from York.
• Weekend: independent study on the learning objectives, concentrating on topics you find harder or more interesting.
• Monday: the group meets again to review what everyone found, often using quizzes or games to test each other.
• Tuesday: clinical placement. The York student described a half-day in a hospital or GP surgery, talking to patients in small groups, taking histories and sometimes practising basic examinations. The Hull student alternated between GP and hospital settings.
• Wednesday: both students described a lighter day, used for rest, sport and preparing for the next case.

You learn anatomy in weekly sessions tied to the PBL case, so the structures you study match the patient problem your group is working on. The focus is on anatomy you will use as a doctor: explaining a patient's symptoms, carrying out examinations and reading clinical images.

The main teaching material is prosections. These are real human specimens that the school's anatomists have already dissected to show particular structures, so you can study a region quickly and compare how it varies between bodies. Some are formalin-embalmed, which keeps them flexible enough to move structures and see how they sit in three dimensions.

Others are plastinated, meaning the body fluids and fat have been replaced with materials such as silicone resin. They are firmer, can be handled without gloves and last indefinitely. You also use anatomical models, which can be taken into PBL sessions, and medical imaging such as CT, MRI and ultrasound, which is how most doctors see anatomy in practice.

For study outside the lab you get access to two digital 3D programs, Complete Anatomy and Acland's Video Atlas of Human Anatomy, both usable in class and from home.

Dissecting a body yourself is not part of the core course. If you want to, you can carry out a detailed dissection of one region of the body as an SSIP project or during the year 5 elective. Whole-body dissection is available if you intercalate on the MSc in Clinical Anatomy or the MSc in Clinical Anatomy and Education.

Anatomy is tested partly through spotter exams. You move round stations of specimens with labelled structures and answer questions on what a structure is, what it does or how it relates to its neighbours. Year 1 includes a formative spotter, a practice exam that gives feedback but does not count towards progression.

Clinical experience starts in the third week of year 1. In years 1 and 2 placements are in or around your home campus city, and you work in small groups under a clinical tutor, talking to patients, taking histories and starting to examine them. What you see on placement links back to your PBL case.

Students' own accounts on the school's website fill in the detail for year 1. Placement is usually half a day a week, in a group of about two to five students with a tutor, and alternates week by week between a hospital and a GP surgery. You go over pre-set work with the tutor first. Then one student takes the patient's history while the others watch, add their own questions and give feedback afterwards.

You prepare for placements in clinical skills classes. From year 2 you also have dedicated sessions on clinical reasoning, which is the process of working out the most likely cause of a patient's symptoms from the history, the examination and test results.

Year 3 is the step up to full-time clinical work in hospitals, GP surgeries and community services, and your responsibility grows from there. By year 5 you take part in on-call and shift work, are allocated your own patients on surgical placements, and manage common conditions in general practice under supervision.

In the same set of accounts, final-year students describe days that start with handover and a ward round, where the consultant may quiz you. Afternoons bring clinics, prescribing and clinical skills, and you help the team with jobs such as taking blood, inserting cannulas and catheterising patients.

Assessment is split into formative and summative work. Formative assessments give you feedback but do not count towards progression, while summative assessments decide whether you move on. A compulsory formative test in the style of the real exams comes at the end of each block or rotation, and summative exams are held at the end of every year.

In years 1 to 4 the written papers combine multiple choice and modified essay questions. The multiple choice questions can be single best answer (pick the best of several options), extended matching (match options to several short scenarios) or true or false. Modified essay questions take you through a case in stages, with short written answers. Material from earlier years can come up again.

Clinical exams put you in front of a trained examiner who watches what you do. In years 2 and 3 the summative clinical exam is an OSCE, a circuit of short stations testing communication, physical examination and problem-solving with simulated patients or healthy volunteers. In years 4 and 5 it is an OSLER: at each long station you consult a real or simulated patient, then answer questions on the likely diagnosis and management.

In year 5 you sit the UK Medical Licensing Assessment (UKMLA), which the GMC requires UK medical graduates to pass before joining the medical register. Its written part, the Applied Knowledge Test (AKT), is set nationally with the Medical Schools Council and uses single best answer questions only. Its clinical part, the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA), is your year 5 OSLER. You must also pass the Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA), a national online exam on prescribing medicines safely.

When the GMC approved the school's CPSA in March 2024, it had six stations, usually taken two a day over three days. Each station had 15 minutes with a real or simulated patient, three minutes of thinking time and 12 minutes of structured questions on problem-solving and management, three hours in total. The GMC's report noted the school was considering a move to eight stations from 2025, so the details may have changed.

Each summative assessment is graded Excellent, normally the top 15% of the cohort, Pass or Fail. An online portfolio records your attendance, professionalism and procedural skills and must be complete for you to progress. In years 1 to 4 you have two valid attempts at each assessment, and final-year assessments allow up to four. The MB BS is unclassified, but exceptional students can graduate with Honours.

• To graduate you must pass every year 5 summative assessment, including the AKT, the OSLER-based CPSA, the Prescribing Safety Assessment and the elective presentation.
• You must also complete the student assistantship and its portfolio, and show competence in all the required clinical procedures.
• Finally, you must be in good standing with the school's Student Fitness to Practise Committee, which decides whether a student is safe to continue towards becoming a doctor.

In years 1 and 2 your placements are in or around Hull or York, depending on your home campus, and you are expected to live within 30 miles of your university during term. From year 3 you are allocated a clinical base site in either Hull or York each year and keep your own accommodation there.

Some placements are away from your base, in towns such as Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Scarborough, Northallerton or Middlesbrough. When a placement needs extra accommodation, the school gives support so you do not pay for two homes at once, either by reimbursing you or by paying some costs directly. You agree each year to attend any placement site the school assigns, and requests to change cannot always be met.

Each placement hospital has a student teaching area with a medical library, computers, lockers, a kitchen and a common room. A Student Liaison Team and the Primary Care Team are based there to organise and support you. The school says it reviews its placements regularly, so arrangements may change in future years.

The SSIP runs through years 1 to 4. In each Phase I year you choose a project from a list and work with tutors who are active researchers. Themes range from medical humanities and health inequalities to global public health, experimental medicine and biomedicine. Each project is graded, and you must pass it to progress.

In Phase II the projects become clinical and follow your own interests. In year 3 you work in a group on a quality improvement project and present it together. In year 4 you complete an individual project, which could be research, an audit of patient care, or teaching and assessment materials for future doctors, and present it as a poster. LIC students can link theirs to their GP placement.

The elective is six weeks long and comes in year 5, before final-year placements. You choose where to go and what to do: more time in an area of practice that interests you, research, or a specialty you have not yet seen. The school lists past destinations including the Institute of Neurology in London, Fort William, Shetland, Vanuatu, Nepal, Belize, Malaysia, South Africa and NASA in the USA.

You pay for the elective yourself, and costs depend on where you go. Afterwards you present your experience at the school's annual elective poster and presentation conference, and you must pass this presentation to graduate.

For extra research experience, the school takes part in INSPIRE, a national scheme coordinated by the Academy of Medical Sciences and funded by the Wellcome Trust. Its funding, received since 2014, pays for student projects, an annual student conference and workshops. The student research society runs its own annual conference, and the school offers help with costs if you are invited to present at a research conference.

Intercalating means taking a year out of the MB BS to complete a separate degree, which adds a year to your studies. It is optional at HYMS, but the school encourages everyone to consider it. You can intercalate after year 2 on a specially designed intercalated BSc, or after year 3 on a BSc, a master's degree or, in exceptional cases, a PhD.

You can study at HYMS or at another university in the UK or abroad. The school's own master's options are Clinical Anatomy; Clinical Anatomy and Education; Health Technology and Human Anatomy; Health Professions Education; Pharmacology and Drug Development; and Pharmacology and Education. The two Clinical Anatomy courses include whole-body dissection. There is also a research MSc by thesis.

Two intercalated BSc (Hons) Medical Sciences degrees are run with the parent universities. One is based at Hull's Centre for Biomedicine. The other is with York's Department of Biology and covers topics such as cancer biology, infectious disease, immunology and neuroscience. The school also lists master's courses at the two universities, including public health, mental health research, and health and climate change.

In Hull, the medical school is based in the Allam Medical Building, at the centre of the University of Hull's £28 million health campus. In the building you mix with students training in nursing, midwifery and as physician associates.

In York, the school's teaching space was refurbished in 2020 at a cost of £5.8 million and includes a PBL suite and a collaborative learning space. Clinical skills are taught in rooms in the nearby Seebohm Rowntree Building.

From year 3 most teaching moves to the student teaching facilities at each placement hospital, where you practise procedures and run simulated scenarios with a mannequin. Students on the LIC also use the STRIVE medical education facility at the Friarage Hospital.

Your PBL tutor, an experienced clinician, is your main pastoral contact in the early years. On placement a clinical tutor acts as your Educational Supervisor, helping you develop your consultation and examination skills. On the standard year 4 you change supervisor after 16 weeks, while LIC students keep one supervisor for the year and have weekly supervision.

Every placement site has a Student Liaison Team that helps with local learning issues and can advise on living in the area. The Student Wellbeing Team specialises in supporting medical students and can point you to help in the school, the two universities or outside services. There is also a dedicated mental health practitioner you can contact directly and in confidence.

A Case Management Group picks up early concerns, such as poor attendance, late work or skipping practice assessments, and offers support before anything becomes a formal fitness to practise matter. You can also use student support services at both universities, and student representatives sit on the school's Student Staff Committee and Management Board.