The Kent and Medway (KMMS) Medicine course

KMMS describes its course as systems-based and integrated. In Years 1 and 2 each science module covers one group of body systems. Every module draws on a shared set of ten curriculum threads, which the school calls Fundamental Tracks. Subjects such as pathology and pharmacology therefore come up in module after module rather than being taught once.

The ten tracks are anatomy; biomedicine; ethics, law and professionalism; human behaviour; pathology; person and population health; pharmacology and therapeutics; physiology; professional and clinical skills; and scholarship and scientific enquiry. Alongside three science modules, each of the first two years has a clinical skills module, a module on professional development and person-centred practice, and a module built around your GP placements. Person-centred means treating the patient as a whole person with their own priorities, not just a condition.

From Year 3 most of your learning happens on placement rather than on campus. Central teaching continues alongside it, for example psychiatry teaching days in Year 3 and weekly online sessions during Year 4 general practice blocks. You also learn about leadership and teamwork with students from other years and from other courses at the Canterbury campuses.

Patient educators, people who share their own experience of illness and care, take part in teaching throughout the course and give you feedback on your skills. Learning is also anchored in individual patient studies, which tie knowledge and professional values to real people's circumstances. The course trains digital skills too, including using electronic patient records and the principles of bioinformatics, the use of computing to handle biological data.

The University of Kent's course page shows a sample week from the first term of Year 1. Days start at 9am and finish by about 4pm, and most of the time goes on lectures for the first science module, Foundations of Health and Disease. Small-group workshops fill Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and Friday morning, with a seminar on Friday afternoon.

Wednesday is different. The morning has lectures for the general practice and clinical skills modules, and the afternoon is free; KMMS says Wednesday afternoons are usually kept clear for sport, societies and other university activities. On Thursday there is also a workshop for the professional development module. Small-group sessions may fall at other times depending on your group.

The same page gives Year 1 contact hours. Across the year you have about 150 hours of lectures, 125 of workshops, 78 of seminars and 158 on placement, plus smaller amounts of practical classes, simulation, tutorials and drop-in sessions. In total the year has just under 700 timetabled hours.

Six weeks a year look different, because you spend them at your GP placement instead of on campus. The first includes an induction to your primary care network. Each week starts and ends with a meeting with the network's Lead Educational Supervisor, who oversees your placement and runs joint teaching sessions. In between, you attend clinics and services with a range of healthcare professionals.

During the week you meet selected patients whose conditions fit the theme, join case-based group sessions and go to specialised clinics. Supervisors are asked to protect teaching time, both with patients and away from them. As you progress, you are expected to work more independently and to practise skills repeatedly until you are competent.

Anatomy is taught within the body-system modules of Years 1 and 2. KMMS uses cadaveric dissection, where students dissect a human body donated for medical education, and prosection, where you study specimens that have already been dissected by experts to show particular structures. The University of Kent's course page describes this as full-body dissection.

Teaching takes place in the anatomy learning centre, which is equipped for dissection, prosection and radiology. Radiology is medical imaging, such as X-rays, CT and MRI scans. Learning it next to real specimens helps you recognise structures the way you will later see them on patients' scans. Digital media are also used in the dissection lab.

Anatomy does not stop after Year 2: it is one of the Fundamental Tracks that the final-year Finals module builds on. Virtual microscopy, where you examine digitised tissue slides on screen, and radiology are used in lectures, tutorials and clinical placements to give a fuller picture of a patient's illness.

Your first clinical placement comes in the first term of Year 1, usually in early November; in 2026-27 the first Year 1 placement week begins on 9 November. You join a primary care network in a group of six to eight students and stay with it for all six placement weeks of the year.

In Year 1 the placements show you the professionals, services and care pathways that support patients and their carers outside hospital. In Year 2 the focus moves to people with long-term conditions and how their care is joined up. Where possible you move to a different network for each year, so you see different patient populations and ways of working.

From Year 3 you work in hospitals and mental health services, based mainly at one acute trust, and general practice returns in Years 4 and 5. By Year 5 your placements are aimed at preparing you for the role of a junior doctor, including deciding when a patient in the community needs to be referred to hospital.

KMMS uses two kinds of assessment. Formative assessments are practice runs whose results only give you feedback. Summative assessments count towards whether you pass. Every major summative assessment is preceded by a formative one in the same format, so you are never seeing a format for the first time when it counts.

You must pass every module in a year to move on to the next year or to graduate. The knowledge tests in the Year 1 and 2 body-system modules have in-year resits. The OSCEs at the end of every year, and the end-of-year knowledge tests in Years 3 and 4, use sequential testing instead. Everyone sits a first sequence, and students who have not clearly met the standard sit a second one, so there is no separate in-year resit.

A failed year can usually be repeated, but under the 2026 regulations, failing the same year twice, or failing a third year, ends your place on the course. You have at most ten years to finish, or longer if you intercalate. If you leave early, you can receive a Certificate of Higher Education in Medical Science after Year 1, a Diploma after Year 2 or a Bachelor of Medical Science (BMedSci) after Year 3.

Since the 2024-25 academic year, a UK medical degree only counts as a qualification to register as a doctor if it includes a pass in the Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA), often called the UKMLA. It has two parts. The Applied Knowledge Test is set nationally by the Medical Schools Council as two papers of 100 single best answer questions, two hours each, on consecutive days. It is pitched at the level of a doctor in their first week of the Foundation Programme, the training new doctors start after graduating.

The second part, the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment, is KMMS's own final-year OSCE, checked against GMC requirements. In the plan KMMS submitted in 2022, which the GMC approved in 2024, it is a 20-station sequential OSCE. The first sequence has 12 stations over two days; an extra 8 stations follow about eight to ten days later for students below the standard. Stations last 12 minutes, with a minute and a half of reading time.

In that plan, simulated patients and healthy volunteers can award up to two marks per station, and all candidates get written feedback within about three working days of the first sequence. Failing the whole sequence usually means repeating the year. The GMC's 2024 report on KMMS's final knowledge test also lists the other parts of Finals. They are the Prescribing Safety Assessment, an ePortfolio, a clinical activity logbook, case-based discussions, workplace-based assessments, an Immediate Life Support resuscitation course and an elective report, and each must be passed on its own.

• Applied Knowledge Tests: online papers of single best answer questions, where you choose the best of five options, and very short answer questions, where you type a brief answer. All are sat in the same campus building on the platform used for the national MLA test.
• OSCEs: stations marked by clinical examiners on iPads in the simulation suite at Christ Church. The format works much like the multiple mini interviews used in admissions, where you move round short timed stations.
• Essays and reports for coursework on scholarly and scientific skills.
• An ePortfolio for coursework, workplace-based learning and records of attendance and engagement, which count towards professionalism.
• Individual or small-group oral presentations of projects.
• Case-based discussions in the senior years, where you present and discuss a patient case from your placement.
• The Year 4 knowledge test uses the same timings as the national MLA knowledge test.

For the first two years your placements are in primary care networks across Kent and Medway, so placement weeks can mean travelling from Canterbury to other towns. KMMS works with GP practices across the region and with community providers such as urgent treatment centres and hospices. Its partners page also lists 13 community hospitals, four mental health care providers and one ambulance trust.

From Year 3 to Year 5 you are based mainly in and around one of the four acute hospital trusts in Kent and Medway. You live for most of the year in the part of the region linked to that trust, rotating through medical, surgical and other specialties there. The Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust runs psychiatry placements across the county.

KMMS's travel and accommodation policy for 2026-27 sets out who pays. In Years 3 to 5, accommodation near your hospital placement is provided during placement weeks, including weekends and holidays, and paid for from NHS England funding for student placements. KMMS also refunds one trip from the university to the trust at the start of a placement and one back at the end.

In Year 5, accommodation is funded only for placement weeks up to 24 April 2027. For the Easter break and the exam period you arrange and pay for your own.

For GP placements, travel is refunded at set rates. In Years 1 and 2 you claim the cost above your normal journey to campus. In Years 4 and 5 the refund is capped at the cost from the university campus to your network's lead practice. If the commute would be over 50 miles or 1.5 hours each way, or mean leaving before 6.30am or getting back after 7.30pm, you can ask for paid accommodation. Food costs are not refunded.

When the first KMMS students reached Year 3 in 2022, they were split between the trusts in groups of up to 31 and spent 32 weeks on site. In October 2025 the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells trust opened an Undergraduate Medical Building at Tunbridge Wells Hospital, with 144 en-suite rooms and teaching space. The mental health trust refunds approved travel between your accommodation, its placements and its teaching.

KMMS gathers its optional and self-directed work under the heading of student choice, which builds up over the five years. Student-selected components (SSCs) let you study an area beyond the core curriculum. In Year 2 the GP module includes an SSC project on managing long-term illness.

By August 2025, students had completed 115 different SSCs. Topics ranged from global health, quality improvement, forensics and medical ethics to robotic surgery, leadership and digital health. The Year 4 Individual Research Project also sits within student choice, with supervisors drawn from KMMS, both universities and the NHS.

The elective programme began in 2025. An elective is a placement you choose, and KMMS supports clinical or academic electives in Kent, elsewhere in the UK or abroad. Early electives ranged from placements in Ghana to floating hospital boats in Peru. The GMC's 2024 report on KMMS's final knowledge test lists an elective report as one of the required parts of the final-year Finals module.

Beyond the timetable, the school also points students to summer research internships funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

Intercalating means pausing the medical course to study for an extra degree, then returning to medicine. At KMMS it is optional and usually adds one year, taken after Year 3 or after Year 4. After Year 3 you can take a bachelor's or master's degree. After Year 4 you can also take a PhD, which keeps you away from the course for more than a year.

To be eligible you must have passed every year at the first attempt and discussed intercalating with your Clinical Academic Tutor. KMMS also looks at your marks, attendance and engagement so far, and the approval lapses if you later have to repeat a year. You apply to KMMS by mid-December and hear in mid-January. You can then apply for a course at another university, but must not accept a place without KMMS's permission.

KMMS has NIHR funding that pays full fees and a stipend, a living allowance, for an intercalated master's degree. The current award covers 2024-25 to 2026-27, with 8 funded places in 2026-27, and is open only to KMMS students. To be considered, you say so in your application and show how the subject will help your medical studies and build your research experience.

KMMS also runs its own intercalated MSc in Clinical Education, which trains you to teach. It includes the equivalent of a Postgraduate Certificate in Medical or Clinical Education, a teaching qualification many doctors take later in their careers. You do 20 hours of teaching practice during the year, with help finding local opportunities. Completing the certificate stage lets you apply for membership of the Academy of Medical Educators, subject to approval.

In Years 1 and 2 you use purpose-built teaching space on both Canterbury campuses: lecture theatres, seminar rooms, PC suites, flexible work spaces, the anatomy learning centre, clinical skills facilities and simulation suites. KMMS has a high-fidelity hospital simulation suite, where realistic equipment is used to rehearse clinical situations safely, and a GP simulation suite set up like a general practice.

The clinical simulation suite is on the Canterbury Christ Church University campus, in its science, technology, health and medicine building. The GMC's 2024 report on KMMS's final clinical exam describes the suite as an eight-bed ward, two further ward areas, open-plan skills areas, simulation rooms, and debriefing and control rooms. It uses the same clinical equipment as local NHS trusts. You learn clinical skills there and sit your OSCEs there.

You have full access to both universities' libraries, which have extended opening hours, and a dedicated KMMS librarian helps you build research and digital skills. Placement sites have their own medical libraries, computer suites and clinical skills training areas. Every university campus and hospital site has computers connected to both the university and hospital networks.

In your first week of teaching you are given a Personal Academic Tutor, who guides you on academic progress and personal development and can help with minor short-term problems. From Year 3 a named Clinical Academic Tutor takes over and stays with you for the rest of the course. This is usually a senior clinician at a local hospital trust, and you meet both tutors together at the start of Year 3.

In Year 1 you can choose to be paired with a second-year student through the Student Academic Peer Mentoring Scheme. KMMS's own Student Life and Guidance team is the first place to go with any difficulty. It runs drop-ins during office hours, offers one-to-one check-ins throughout the programme and supports you on placement as well as on campus.

Specialist help comes through the University of Kent's Student Support and Wellbeing team. Disability, specific learning difficulty and mental health advisers arrange adjustments for teaching, exams and placements. Counselling includes short-term solution-focused sessions and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), with online sessions if you cannot get to Canterbury. Out of hours, Spectrum Life offers phone, text and online support.

The University Medical Centre, an NHS GP practice on the University of Kent campus, is open to KMMS students, and a 24-hour nursing service on the same campus treats minor illnesses and injuries. MedSoc, the student medical society founded by the first KMMS cohort, runs socials, balls and specialty sub-societies. In Year 2 you are invited to help create the annual KMMS Inclusion Conference.