The Imperial College London Medicine course

In Years 1 and 2 you are taught through a mix of interactive large-group sessions and small-group work. Much of it follows a flipped classroom model, and the timetable runs on a repeating pattern, so professional knowledge, clinical skills and professional values each get regular slots. Some teaching is built around patient cases that make you combine science and clinical knowledge from different modules, and simulation prepares you for your first placements.

Clinical communication and anatomy are both led by the Department of Surgery and Cancer and are woven through the course. The Human Anatomy Unit itself teaches MBBS students in Years 1, 2, 4 and 5. You are taught by people at every level, from professors to PhD students, and some sessions are led by fellow students or outside specialists.

In Year 3 the teaching moves mainly onto placements, with campus teaching blocks in between, and Year 4 returns you to a university setting for the BSc. In Years 5 and 6 you are placed inside hospital and community clinical teams. Structured teaching and simulation sessions put you in unfamiliar situations so you can practise making decisions when the answer is not clear. You will also work some out-of-hours shifts on placement.

Medicine at Imperial is a full working week. The programme specification says you can normally expect timetabled teaching from 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, with Wednesday afternoons kept free for sport, clubs and other activities. Time for preparation, consolidation and independent study is built in around the scheduled sessions.

The groups you belong to stay the same all year. The whole year of about 360 meets for lectures and exams. Each of the four cohorts, labelled A to D, has about 90 students, and many sessions bring one or two cohorts together. Your small group of five or six is the one you work with most closely: you complete some group assessments together and share an Academic Tutor.

GP placement days break up the campus weeks, falling on Thursdays in Year 1 and Tuesdays in Year 2. So a week in Years 1 and 2 is mostly campus teaching with one day out in a practice.

By Year 3 a week looks very different. During MICA you spend seven sessions a week at the practice. Four are clinics, one of which may be an experience session with staff such as nurses or pharmacists, or in a specialist clinic such as diabetes or asthma. The other three are a tutorial, a visiting session, which may be used for home visits to patients with long-term conditions, and a session for your community project.

Anatomy, the study of the body's structure, is taught in the Human Anatomy Unit at the Charing Cross Campus, part of the Department of Surgery and Cancer. The unit teaches MBBS students in Years 1, 2, 4 and 5. It is licensed by the Human Tissue Authority, the body that regulates how donated bodies and tissue are used.

The unit has a dissection room, an anatomy skills laboratory and a pathology museum. The dissection room is a large, naturally lit space holding potted specimens, bones, models and prosections. Prosections are body parts an expert has already dissected, so the structures are laid out ready for you to study.

Imperial lists what the unit can offer medical students as whole body dissection, prosections, skeletal material, anatomical models and living anatomy classes. The Department of Surgery and Cancer describes it as providing cadaver anatomy and pathology resources. Living anatomy means working on a living person, usually a volunteer or a classmate, feeling for bones, pulses and other landmarks under the skin. That is a list of what the unit provides, not a statement of how much dissecting MBBS students do themselves.

The unit aims to teach anatomy in a way that connects directly to clinical practice. Its teaching team includes anatomists, biomedical scientists and surgical demonstrators.

Imperial says you have direct contact with patients from your first term. Your first visits are to general practice, through the Year 1 Patients, Communities and Healthcare module. In a group of four or eight, you spend eight days at a GP surgery between October and March. The core activities are conversations with patients, sitting in on GP clinics, a community survey project and group tutorials. Year 1 also includes a hospital placement in May.

In Year 2 you return to a GP surgery for five days between November and March. This is the first placement where you take histories, meaning you ask patients structured questions about their symptoms and background. You also learn health coaching, which helps patients make changes to their own health. Two-week hospital placements in early December and early March let you practise simple bedside tests and procedures on the wards.

Your clinical skills are assessed from your very first placement, through workplace-based assessments in which a healthcare professional observes you with a patient and records how you did. In Year 3, and again in Years 5 and 6 after the BSc year, most of your time is spent in clinical settings, building up to the full range of specialties.

Imperial uses programmatic assessment. Rather than resting everything on one exam, the school gathers many pieces of evidence across the year, from written papers to observed clinical work, and gives you regular feedback through a tutor. Progress tests are on its published list of assessment methods too: papers that sample the whole course rather than the block you have just finished. At the end of each year the exam board reviews everything before letting you progress. Outside the BSc year, pass marks are set separately for each exam rather than fixed at 40 per cent.

In Years 1 and 2, knowledge is tested with single best answer questions, where you choose the best of several options, and very short answer questions, where you write a word or short phrase. Short answer questions are marked by you against model answers and then discussed with a tutor. Group projects and a spot test also count. Clinical skills are assessed on placement from Year 1, then in a Clinical Practical Assessment in Year 2 and the OSCE in Year 3. Modules in Years 1 to 3 and Year 6 carry a mix of pass/fail and graded assessments, even though the MBBS as a whole is pass or fail.

Some assessments are gateways required by the GMC. They include Directly Observed Procedural Skills (DOPS), where a clinician watches you carry out a practical procedure on placement. You can repeat a DOPS until you pass, but you cannot sit end-of-year exams until your placements and gateways are complete. Other assessments normally allow two attempts. Failing both without accepted mitigating circumstances normally means leaving the course.

Your BSc class depends only on Year 4. For pathways run by the School of Medicine, the project report is worth 35 per cent and the group literature review 15 per cent. The project presentation and Science in Context poster are worth 10 per cent each, and three Module 1 tasks make up the other 30 per cent. A first needs 70 per cent overall. The MBBS itself is not classified: you pass or fail.

To be registered to practise, UK graduates must pass both parts of the GMC's Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA). The Applied Knowledge Test (AKT), sat in Year 6, uses papers supplied centrally by the Medical Schools Council. In the design the GMC approved in 2024, it was two computer-based papers of 100 single best answer questions, two hours each, on consecutive days. At the time of that 2024 review, students sat it on their Imperial iPads. Under the 2025-26 programme specification you get up to four attempts, no more than two a year.

The Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA) is the practical part, run by Imperial as PACES. In the version the GMC approved in April 2024, you first had to complete all your DOPS and an oxygen prescribing task. You then moved through 12 ten-minute stations in one day, such as heart and lung examinations, histories and acute care. To pass you needed at least half the stations and 50 per cent in each of four areas. You must also pass the Prescribing Safety Assessment, an online exam on prescribing medicines safely.

Most campus teaching is at South Kensington and Charing Cross, but you go off campus in every year, and the main clinical attachments away from campus are in Years 3, 5 and 6. Imperial gives its list of teaching hospitals only as a guide and says it also works with healthcare providers inside and outside London. Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust alone offers more than 3,000 placements a year to Imperial medical students.

GP placements in all six years are run by Imperial's Undergraduate Primary Care Education Unit, which works with more than 150 host practices. It aims to allocate practices so that your travel time and costs stay low. Its map of usual placement areas covers most of west and north-west London, roughly from Uxbridge and Harefield in the west to Paddington, Hampstead and Chelsea in the east.

You commute to placements from wherever you live. Travel is a cost you have to budget for, although the programme specification says some of it is covered by the NHS Bursary in Years 5 and 6. The school says students alternate between nearer and further placements so the long journeys are shared out. University accommodation is only offered in Year 1, so from Year 2 you rent privately.

Hospitals have their own support for students. Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust runs undergraduate education centres at Hammersmith, St Mary's and Charing Cross hospitals, which welcome students, handle administration and offer pastoral care. At Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, an Undergraduate Medicine Office coordinates your teaching, and three full-time education fellows add tutorials, from one-to-one sessions to group teaching, and mentoring.

In Year 5 every student does a three-week Specialty Choice Placement (SCP). You can use it to go deeper into a specialty you have enjoyed or to try something the main curriculum does not cover. Some SCPs are hosted by GP practices with a special interest, usually for about seven sessions a week.

The elective comes at the very end of the course, after your final exams and the licensing assessment, as part of the Preparedness for Practice module. You organise your own eight-week placement, in the UK or abroad. Travel and accommodation costs depend on where you go, and the school says these may be subsidised in some circumstances if you apply.

There is choice earlier too. In Year 2 you pick your I-Explore module, and in Years 1 and 4 you can take extracurricular Horizons modules, Imperial's programme of courses in languages, culture and communication. Years 3, 5 and 6 are too placement-based for Horizons. The programme specification also lists optional research project opportunities at the Institute of Science Tokyo.

Intercalating means taking an extra degree during a medical course. At Imperial it is not a separate decision, because the BSc is built into Year 4 for everyone. You study one of the pathways below, and your preferences are taken into account when places are allocated. The title of your BSc reflects your pathway. In certain circumstances it may be possible to take an intercalated BSc at another UK university instead.

The list changes over time. Multisystem Disorders and Therapies is listed as new for 2026-27. Imperial's own BSc guide for that year says it is still waiting for university approval, so fifteen pathways are settled and this one is not yet. The 2025-26 programme specification also included Molecular and Translational Haematology, and Immunity and Infection.

Each pathway also takes visiting medical, dental and veterinary students from other universities, from two places on Gastroenterology and Hepatology to 40 on Management.

If you want to go further into research, you can apply for the MBBS/PhD during your third or fourth year. You need satisfactory results in the early years, normally no exam resits and at least a 2:1 (an upper second-class degree) in your BSc. With permission, you then apply for a funded MB/PhD advertised in the Faculty, or secure funding for the three years with your proposed supervisor. You formally interrupt the MBBS during the PhD, and places are not guaranteed.

• Anaesthesia and Critical Care; Biomedical Engineering; Cancer Frontiers; Cardiovascular Sciences
• Endocrinology; Gastroenterology and Hepatology; Global Health; Humanities, Philosophy and Law
• Management; Multisystem Disorders and Therapies (new for 2026-27 and still awaiting university approval); Neuroscience and Mental Health; Pharmacology
• Remote Medicine; Reproductive and Developmental Sciences; Surgical Design, Technology and Innovation; Translational Respiratory Medicine

In Year 1 your face-to-face teaching is split between South Kensington and Charing Cross. In the autumn term that includes the anatomy dissecting room and anatomy laboratory at Charing Cross, alongside lecture theatres, seminar rooms and collaborative learning suites for group work.

The Pathology Museum, on the 11th floor of the Charing Cross Laboratory Block, has about 1,600 specimens on display, dating back to 1888, each showing the effects of a disease. It has individual bays for self-study and small groups, and a seminar room for larger workshops. It also holds an Anatomage table, a large touchscreen that shows full male and female anatomy and many examples of disease, built from real patient data.

Every student receives an Imperial iPad in the first week, set up for the platforms you use daily. MedLearn holds your dashboard and e-portfolio, Canvas your course materials and Panopto recordings of teaching sessions. Sofia maps the learning outcomes of every module and topic, and SparkForms is where workplace-based assessments are recorded on placement.

When you join you are assigned an Academic Tutor, who normally looks after up to 12 students from two linked small groups. In the first three years you have scheduled tutor group sessions and an individual meeting each term. Your tutor reviews your exam results and feedback, gives careers advice, writes references and advises on BSc and elective choices. They are also your first point of contact if personal problems affect your studies.

In the later years you are allocated a Clinical Tutor, typically a consultant (a senior hospital doctor) at one of the teaching hospitals, whom you meet at least once a term. Because they know you, they can support you on placement and complete paperwork for your elective and Foundation Programme applications. The Foundation Programme is the training new UK doctors start in.

Each year group has at least one Senior Tutor for health and wellbeing matters. They handle medical support, discuss how reasonable adjustments can work on a medicine course, make sure exam arrangements are in place and advise on financial help. They can refer you to the Imperial College Health Centre, Occupational Health or counselling and mental health services.

The School of Medicine has its own Welfare Team, offering confidential one-to-one meetings and help with mental health, money, including the school's hardship support, and accommodation. In 2024 the GMC's review of the final practical exam noted that students who failed it were offered meetings with the welfare team, a senior tutor and the heads of assessment and year. After these meetings a personal plan was drawn up to help each student improve.

Medical students also have their own students' union, the Imperial College School of Medicine Students' Union (ICSMSU), with more than 70 clubs and societies. Its academic societies run tutorials, lecture series and mock exams, so a good deal of revision help comes from students in the years above you.