The King's College London (KCL) Medicine course

King's runs an integrated course: the science and the clinical material are taught next to each other rather than in separate blocks of years. Year 1 is mostly campus-based, built from lectures, seminars and independent study. King's counts one credit as roughly ten notional hours of learning, so year 1 at 120 credits stands for about 1,200 hours of taught and private study.

From year 2 the balance tips towards patients. One day a week is spent in general practice, and the rest of the week mixes campus teaching, clinical skills work and, from year 3, hospital attachments. King's uses the word block to mean an eight-week unit of clinical time, and each clinical year is built from several of them.

Stage 2, across years 2 and 3, is worth 300 credits; Stage 3, across years 4 and 5, is worth 360. In years 4 and 5 you work much more like a junior member of the clinical team. Most learning happens on placement, with a central King's teaching session online on Wednesday mornings.

The final year adds a weekly online seminar, where students at different practices compare what they have seen. It also adds the turnaround clinic, in which you and your GP tutor take turns watching each other consult. The point of both is to make your own reasoning visible so it can be corrected.

In year 1 the week is built from lectures, seminars, anatomy sessions and your own reading, almost all of it on campus. King's said in its applying to medicine FAQ, published in July 2023, that the earlier years of the course run more or less nine to five. Later on, as the work becomes clinical, you need to be able to stay past five when the team you are with is still going.

In year 2 one day a week is a practice day, on either a Tuesday or a Friday. Half the day is a workshop for the whole group of eight, on a theme such as breathlessness, safe prescribing or a painful joint. For the other half, one or two pairs sit in on a teaching clinic while the rest do group project work or visit patients from their patient bank.

In years 3 and 4 most days are spent on an eight-week hospital block, on wards and in clinics alongside the team looking after those patients. Four days a year are different: you go to the Royal College of General Practitioners for a simulation clinic. One group of students works through five simulated appointments in the morning and a second group repeats the same five in the afternoon, so your own sitting there is half a day.

The final-year GP block defines the week as ten sessions. Five are supervised clinical sessions in the practice, each three and a half to four hours. One is a two-hour online seminar with a GP teacher. Wednesday morning is a central teaching session run by King's and delivered online, and Wednesday afternoon is your own time. The last two sessions are private study.

On top of those ten sessions, two hours of one-to-one tutorial with your GP tutor are protected every week of the block. Consultation length is agreed with your tutor and shortens over the eight weeks, starting around 60 minutes and working down towards 30.

• Year 2 practice days run on Tuesdays or Fridays, for 22 days across the academic year.
• Year 2 also has six campus days, and on those days nobody is at the practice.
• Three further year 2 teaching days are held at the Royal College of General Practitioners, on clinical reasoning, on clinical examination in the consultation, and on putting it all together.
• In year 4, Wednesday mornings are kept free for the quality improvement project.

Anatomy in year 1 sits inside a 45-credit module called Physiology & Anatomy of Systems. Structure and function are taught together, so the week you learn how a body system is built is also the week you learn how it works.

Two words are worth knowing before an open day. Dissection means students open a donated body themselves, over weeks or months. Prosection means an expert has already done that work and you study the structures they have exposed.

At King's, medicine students dissect. You work on bodies donated for teaching, in the dissection rooms at Guy's Campus, and the larger of the two rooms takes up to 160 students and 80 donated bodies at a time. Every year staff and students attend a service of thanksgiving at Southwark Cathedral for the people who made that gift.

The larger room is laid out as 12 stations, with a wide range of dissection and prosection material, projectors, screens and tablets, so a big cohort can still work in small clusters. The smaller room seats about 40 at 16 height-adjustable stations and is used for specialist modules and for surgical training courses on unembalmed specimens.

Guy's Campus also holds the Gordon Museum of Pathology, whose job is to help medical, dental and biomedical students and professionals learn to diagnose disease. It keeps about 8,000 specimens, the oldest of them dating from 1608. They include Lister's antiseptic spray, and the kidneys, adrenal glands and lymph nodes that led Richard Bright, Thomas Addison and Thomas Hodgkin to describe the three diseases now named after them.

• King's anatomy pages point people who want to donate their body towards the London Anatomy Office, which coordinates donation to London's medical and dental schools.

Year 1 is mostly campus-based, but it includes a 30-credit module called Introduction to Values Based Clinical Practice. Values based clinical practice is the King's phrase for the human side of the job. The assessment form used later in the course spells out what it means. You address the patient's problem, treat them with dignity and respect, build trust, show empathy and keep confidence.

Real placements begin in year 2, in general practice. Each pair of students is given two patients who have consented to regular student contact, and follows them through the year, visiting them away from the timetabled clinics. They are picked to include common long-term conditions such as diabetes or chronic lung disease, and people with more complicated needs such as dementia or the effects of a stroke. Some groups also follow a woman through pregnancy and birth.

Examination skills are layered year by year. In year 2 you learn to examine the respiratory, cardiovascular and abdominal systems. Year 3 adds neurological and musculoskeletal examination, and in year 4 each block brings its own, such as examining a child. By the final year you are expected to take clinical responsibility under close supervision.

King's splits assessment into formative and summative. Formative work exists to give you feedback and does not count towards your degree; summative work decides whether you have met the standard. Stage 1 includes an early formative assessment whose purpose is to find students who need more support before anything is at stake.

Written assessment changes shape as you go. Stage 1 finishes with written examinations. In Stages 2 and 3 written knowledge testing is spread through the year as progress tests, which sample the whole curriculum rather than only what you have just covered. Year 2 alone has three of them. Stage 2 then closes with a written exam and a summative OSCE. In Stage 3 the written testing is those progress tests plus the national Applied Knowledge Test described below, and the summative OSCE is the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment.

Practical assessment is by OSCE, short for Objective Structured Clinical Examination. An OSCE is a circuit of timed stations, each with a task such as taking a history or examining a system, and each marked against the same criteria for every candidate. King's set the pattern out in its July 2023 applying to medicine FAQ. The practice OSCEs in years 2 and 4 are there for feedback, and the ones in years 3 and 5 must be passed before you can move on.

Alongside exams, a portfolio runs from Stage 1 to graduation, collecting observed consultations, case discussions, reflective writing and attendance records signed off by your supervisors. The projects in Stages 2 and 3 are assessed in their own right.

Every UK medical student now has to pass the Medical Licensing Assessment, often written as the UKMLA, before joining the medical register. The General Medical Council (GMC) has required it to be part of any UK medical degree since the 2024 to 2025 academic year. It has two parts: an Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) and a Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA). The GMC judged the King's versions compliant, the CPSA in March 2024 and the AKT in June 2024.

• The Applied Knowledge Test is two computer papers of 100 single-best-answer questions, each two hours, taken on consecutive days.
• Those papers are written and standard-set nationally through the Medical Schools Council, at the level of a doctor in their first week as a foundation doctor.
• This is the design King's set out to the GMC in 2024, when the regulator judged it compliant: a single OSCE of 16 stations over two days, eight minutes per station plus two minutes of reading time.
• To pass you need 12 of the 16 stations, plus an overall minimum competency score across the whole exam.
• The stations cover four physical examinations, four histories, three communication tasks, three practical skills and two whole-patient assessments.
• The four examination stations focus on the core body systems, most often cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal and neurological.
• It runs at four sites, and you are sent to ones unconnected to your placements, attending a different site each day.
• Real and simulated patients add a score of their own, based on whether they would want to see that doctor again.
• Stage 3 includes one external assessment supporting Foundation Year 1 training that you do not currently have to pass to graduate.

Your hospital learning is anchored on three large London teaching hospitals: Guy's, by London Bridge, St Thomas' in central London, and King's College Hospital at Denmark Hill. Around those sit district general hospitals and mental health trusts across south London, Kent, Medway and Sussex.

From year 3 onwards clinical time is organised into eight-week blocks. Unless there are exceptional circumstances, every student does both London and non-London placements, so expect part of your clinical years to be spent outside the city. Those peripheral placements are currently mostly in Kent and Sussex.

General practice teaching is run by a separate team, King's Undergraduate Medical Education in the Community, or KUMEC, based in Addison House on Guy's Campus. It works with a network of around 200 teaching general practices plus additional independent GP tutors, and the school describes clinical placements across more than 350 practices in total.

Travel and accommodation work differently depending on the placement. KUMEC allocates your GP practice, and final-year students are given a choice about the type and location of theirs.

For the final-year GP block you are expected to cover the equivalent of an off-peak Transport for London zone 1 to 6 day travelcard yourself, and to claim anything above that. Daily costs more than double that figure, or a plan to drive, need approval before the block starts.

On mental health blocks with the Kent and Medway trust, King's students are accommodated through partner acute hospitals. The trust reimburses approved travel between accommodation and placement, and King's covers one return journey at the end of the block.

• Attendance on the final-year GP block is expected to be 100 per cent, and anything under 90 per cent triggers a conversation between your tutor and the school.
• Eight monitored teaching sessions must be signed off during that block: a one-to-one tutorial, a mid-block turnaround clinic in week four or five, and six of the seven weekly seminars.
• On the Kent and Medway mental health block, King's runs a full day of teaching every Thursday, covering on-call psychiatry, child mental health, risk, and older adult mental health.

Choice is built into the degree through four separate pieces of credit-bearing work. The student selected component in year 2 is a 15-credit module of projects or short courses in medical, scientific and non-medical subjects, picked according to your own interest. It runs for 14 weeks from January. King's says on the course page that it wants to widen the range of project modules and the choice inside them, so the projects on offer may differ by the time you reach them.

The scholarly project in year 3 is larger at 30 credits and runs for 14 weeks on either Tuesdays or Fridays from mid-September. Because King's is a multi-faculty university, the subject can be drawn from well outside medicine.

An elective is a placement you choose and largely arrange yourself, often abroad. It sits in Stage 3 inside a 30-credit module called Elective & Global Health. Medicine students can spend the fifth-year elective at one of King's partner institutions abroad, arranged through the GKT School of Medical Education.

Stage 3 also holds a 15-credit module called the Career Development Period, a further clinical placement that final-year students can choose to spend in general practice. The Royal College of General Practitioners South London Faculty awards an annual prize to final-year students who show real aptitude for general practice on any of these placements.

Intercalating means pausing the medical degree for a year to take a separate bachelor's degree, then returning. At King's it is optional, lasts one year, and must be taken between Stages 2 and 3, which in practice means between year 3 and year 4. Taking it makes the course six years instead of five.

King's currently lists nine intercalated BSc programmes: anatomy, developmental and human biology; cardiovascular medicine; global health; healthcare genetics and genomics; neuroscience; physiology; primary care; regenerative medicine and innovation technology; and women's health. Each involves studying a subject in more depth and running your own research project. King's said in its July 2023 applying to medicine FAQ that if it does not run the subject you want, you can spend that year at another university.

King's medical students must have passed Stage 1 and Stage 2 to be accepted onto one, and applications open on 1 October for the following September. The primary care iBSc shows what such a year can look like. It combines a general practice clinical experience, study of health systems and inequalities, a quality improvement project and a research project students are supported to write up for publication.

Clinical skills and simulation teaching happens in the King's Simulation and Interactive Learning centres, shortened to SaIL. There are two: the Weston Education Centre at Denmark Hill and the Chantler centre in Shepherd's House at Guy's Campus. They are set up as clinical classrooms and mock hospital and community settings, and are shared with nursing, midwifery, physiotherapy, nutrition and dental students.

The Chantler centre has eight hospital bed bays, actors who play patients, and mannequins that talk, breathe and have a pulse. They let you be taught anything from spotting an abnormal heart rhythm to defibrillation, the controlled electric shock used to correct a dangerous one. You are assessed there as well as taught there.

Guy's Campus holds the anatomy dissecting rooms, the Gordon Museum of Pathology and the Museum of Life Sciences. The latter opened in 2009 and its collection runs from skeletal material and preserved specimens to taxidermy, fossils and dried plants. Addison House on the same campus is home to the KUMEC team of 12 academics and six administrative staff.

Teaching materials, lesson plans and the intended learning outcomes for each placement sit on KEATS, the university's online learning platform, which your GP tutors use too. The guidance for your ePortfolio is published there as well. Some teaching days are held away from King's entirely, at the Royal College of General Practitioners in London.

Facilities on placement vary by trust. At East Sussex Healthcare, each medical education centre has a 90-seat lecture hall, seminar rooms with video conferencing, a simulation suite and a 24-hour library. The Kent and Medway mental health trust issues King's students a laptop for the block so they can reach electronic patient notes on site.

Much of the support here is built into the placements rather than bolted on beside them. Your year 2 GP tutor is also your educational supervisor. They meet you one to one, usually after each teaching clinic, to talk about how you are getting on and to point you towards help if you need it. They also sign off your portfolio, and a mid-point mentoring session is written into the year 2 calendar in January.

The same pattern repeats in the final year. Your GP tutor is your clinical supervisor for the eight-week block, provides two protected hours of one-to-one tutorial a week, and assesses your portfolio. You fill in a self-assessment form before the block and discuss it in the first tutorial, so teaching can be aimed at your gaps rather than at the average student.

KUMEC asks tutors to raise concerns about attendance or performance early, and will meet a student and tutor together to sort out a problem. If a placement relationship breaks down beyond repair, the student is moved elsewhere, though the team treats that as a last resort.

Stage 1 includes an early formative assessment intended to identify students needing extra academic help before any assessment counts. Year 2 has a student support day timetabled in February and consolidation weeks before the progress tests. At the Kent and Medway mental health trust there are separate King's undergraduate administrators for East and West Kent. East Sussex Healthcare has sub-deans and programme administrators for its medical students.