The Lancaster Medicine course

Lancaster teaches mostly through active learning in small groups rather than long days of lectures. You take part in workshops, case-based learning, and sessions in clinical skills and clinical anatomy. You also have lectures and time for independent study. The school says it picks each method to suit what you are learning at that stage, from how the body works to making complex clinical decisions.

The course is organised around the body's systems and comes back to them each year. In a 2024 GMC report, the school's assessment strategy calls this a spiral curriculum: each time a topic returns, you apply it more to real patients and the cases get more complex.

Core themes run alongside the body systems. The course page lists them as including medical sciences, the psychology and sociology of health and illness, population health, professional practice and values, and medical ethics and law. The Medical School's own pages give a slightly different list, which also names epidemiology and evidence-based medicine, and professionalism and professional life skills.

The school describes its programme as values-led, with social justice, inclusion and sustainability at its centre. In practice this means learning how hospital and community care fit together, how health inequalities affect patients, and how to treat every patient fairly. You are taught to see patients as whole people whose background, surroundings and life circumstances shape their illness.

The balance shifts as you go. In Years 1 and 2 you are mainly on campus, working through the body systems in blocks with study skills and consolidation sessions between them. From Year 3 most learning happens on placement, and you come back to campus for teaching weeks that link the science to treating and managing patients. On placement you take patient histories yourself, present them, and use them as the starting point for further study.

You study anatomy in the Clinical Anatomy Learning Centre at the Health Innovation Campus. It has hundreds of anatomical models and Anatomage tables. These tables hold digitised human cadavers, bodies that have been turned into detailed digital images, which you can dissect virtually on a screen.

Lancaster offers the tables as its alternative to wet dissection. Every student can carry out the same procedure on the same digital body. You can switch between male and female bodies, different ages and different diseases, and lay CT and MRI scans over the anatomy. There are no chemicals, fumes or heavy protective kit.

Anatomy is tied closely to clinical work. The tables are also used to teach you to interpret clinical images such as scans. In the clinical skills lab, ultrasound scanning helps you see structures under the skin and helps with procedures such as cannulation.

Your first patients are actors. In Year 1 you practise communication with simulated patients at the Health Innovation Campus, learning to adapt how you speak to different people's needs. The same sessions build your confidence in taking a medical history and doing basic examinations.

Before you have any contact with real patients, you must pass a fitness assessment from the occupational health department at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust. This includes health screening and checking your immunisations against a range of infectious diseases. All medical students also have an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) criminal record check.

Real patients arrive with your first clinical placements in Year 2, in a range of care settings. Each placement follows the body system you have just studied on campus, so you meet the conditions you have learned about. From Year 3 most of your time is spent on placement, and in Year 5 you work in clinical teams in a role close to that of a newly qualified doctor.

Assessment is split into formative tests, which are practice with feedback, and summative exams, which count towards progression. Every summative component must be passed on its own: a strong result in one exam cannot make up for a fail in another. Attendance and engagement at teaching and on placement are also compulsory requirements for moving up a year.

In Years 1 to 4 you sit written exams covering all areas of the curriculum. A panel sets each paper's pass mark without knowing how students did, normally using the modified Angoff method, in which examiners judge how a borderline student would do on each question. The mark can be reviewed afterwards using data on how each question performed and student feedback. Every written exam the school sets already includes 25 per cent extra time for all students.

Clinical skills are tested in OSCEs in Years 2 to 4. At each station an examiner watches you do a task, such as taking a history, examining a patient, carrying out a procedure or explaining your reasoning. A standard OSCE has 14 stations, and you must reach the overall pass score and pass at least 10 stations.

Your Year 4 finals are the Medical Licensing Assessment. The GMC requires every UK medical degree awarded from 2024-25 onwards to include a pass in it. The AKT is a national exam from the Medical Schools Council: two two-hour computer papers, each of 100 single best answer questions, where you pick the best of several options. In 2024 Lancaster planned a first sitting in June and a resit in August.

The CPSA is Lancaster's own finals OSCE, which the GMC confirmed in 2023 meets its requirements. As the school described it then, you complete 14 stations in two sets of seven on consecutive days, each lasting ten minutes. The actors playing patients contribute up to 5 per cent of each station's marks. After the exam, examiners' written feedback, including comments on your professionalism, is checked by the school before it is released to you.

From Year 2 to Year 5 you build an online portfolio showing you have met the required clinical outcomes. Practical procedures are signed off separately through an entrustability framework, where supervisors judge when you can be trusted to do them. Coursework, including Special Study Modules, is graded Excellent, Good, Pass or Fail.

• Resits: in Years 1 to 4 you get a resit within the same academic year. Failing a Year 5 placement block means repeating some or all of the final year the following year.
• Years 1 and 2: failing a resit normally ends your studies, with a right of appeal. Accepted exceptional circumstances, such as illness, can instead lead to a repeat year.
• Year 3 changes from 2026/27. With limited gaps in your results, your resit is a targeted reassessment of just those areas. For the OSCE that means seven more stations, normally needing 15 passes out of the combined 21. Wider gaps normally mean repeating Year 3. Failing the targeted reassessment normally ends your studies, with a right of appeal.
• Year 4: you have an automatic right to repeat the year once. Across the original and any repeat Year 4, you normally get up to four attempts at each part of the MLA.
• Limits: you can normally repeat only one year in total, and must finish within seven years of starting, including any intercalated year.
• Degree class: your ranking combines all your Year 1 to 3 results (two thirds of the score) with your Year 4 results (one third). Individually, Year 4 assessments carry more weight, because they are your final exams. The top tenth graduate with an MBChB with Honours and the next tenth with an MBChB with Commendation.
• Leaving early: if you leave after passing the first three years you may qualify for a BSc (Hons) Medical Sciences, and after four years a BSc (Hons) Advanced Medical Sciences.
• The regulations also mention the Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA), a national pass or fail test of safe prescribing run by MSC Assessment and the British Pharmacological Society. It tests tasks such as writing prescriptions and calculating doses. The school's built-in extra time does not automatically apply to the PSA or the AKT; their providers decide any adjustments.

Lancaster has partnerships with more than 70 healthcare providers across Lancashire, Cumbria and Yorkshire. They include acute hospitals, mental health trusts, GP surgeries, hospices and community healthcare providers. The school says the mix ranges from small rural GP practices to city hospitals and coastal communities with high levels of deprivation.

Placements start in Year 2 and are timed to follow your campus teaching on each body system. In Year 3 you spend most of your time on placement with the partner organisations, and Year 4 follows the same pattern, with teaching weeks on campus between placements. The school puts particular weight on placements in the community, backed by community-focused teaching across the course.

Placements cost money as well as time. The course page lists travel to and from GP and community placements, and accommodation while on placement, among the costs you pay yourself. It says placements are likely to be within Lancashire and South Cumbria. You also need your own stethoscope, scrubs and smart shoes.

In 2021-22 the GMC found that every placement trust was represented on the school's Clinical Collaboration Committee. The school used the committee to monitor teaching, support and facilities on placement, and to act when standards slipped.

Alongside the core course, you can shape your own route through coursework projects, including Special Study Modules, and through the two SAMPs among your five Year 5 placement blocks.

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust says it offers seven-week student choice placements in Year 5. They are aimed at Lancaster students who want to build their knowledge of a particular area of medicine.

The elective is a four-week period at the end of Year 5, after your final-year assessments. You arrange and pay for it yourself. It can be a clinical placement in a hospital or community setting anywhere in the UK or the world, or a short research project on improving healthcare. Some students go to the school's partner institution, Sunway University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

You can instead take a wellbeing elective, a structured option for looking after your mental, emotional and physical health before Foundation training. Examples the school gives include yoga, meditation and mindfulness, arts or music, language study and exploring your religion. An elective supervisor form must be completed before you can graduate.

Intercalating means taking a year out of medicine to study for an extra degree. At Lancaster it is optional and happens between Years 4 and 5, so it comes after your Year 4 finals. The course page says you can study for a bachelor's or a master's-level qualification. The intercalation options Lancaster itself lists are postgraduate: taught master's degrees and master's by research.

The Medical School's intercalation page lists its focal courses for medical students. The taught options are the MSc Biomedicine, MSc Child Mental Health, MSc Clinical Research, MA Global Medical and Health Humanities, MSc Health Data Science, and MSc Psychology of Child Development and Education.

The research options are the MSc by Research in Biomedical Science and the MSc by Research in Medical Sciences, which includes bioethics projects on topics such as medical ethics and law. If you want a course outside this list, the school invites you to discuss it. The four-week Year 3 research module is designed partly as preparation.

Students from other medical schools can also intercalate at Lancaster. For funding, the course page says an NHS bursary is available, subject to availability, in your fifth and sixth years of study. The intercalation page adds that NHS bursaries depend on eligibility, and that you may be eligible for the Lancaster Master's Scholarship.

An intercalated year counts towards the seven years you have to complete the course. The school normally expects your MLA pass to fall within two years of graduating; beyond that, the exam board reviews your recent evidence before deciding whether you need further assessment.

Lancaster Medical School is based in Health Innovation One, the main building of the Health Innovation Campus. It has lecture theatres, tutorial rooms, clinical learning facilities, quiet study space and a cafe, and it also houses businesses working on health research and innovation. Most of your campus learning, including clinical skills, anatomy and small-group teaching, happens there.

• Clinical Anatomy Learning Centre: the models and digital cadaver tables described in the anatomy section
• Clinical skills and simulation laboratory: the mock clinical setting with whole-patient manikins and ultrasound described under teaching
• Independent learning rooms for practising skills in your own time: one at the Health Innovation Campus with five bays and models, and one on the main campus, a 15-minute walk away, with two bays
• Mobile Simulation Teaching Unit: funded by Health Education England and the university. Its interior can be set up as a resuscitation room, an operating theatre or a ward. The manikins show vital signs such as heart rate, and you can practise taking blood and inserting urinary catheters on them
• Clinical training and assessment centres run by University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay at Furness General Hospital, the Royal Lancaster Infirmary and Queen Victoria Hospital, used for teaching, simulation and OSCEs
• Biomedical and Life Sciences laboratories, used by students in the Gateway Year, the preparatory first year of the six-year route

When you join, you are given an academic tutor who meets you regularly to review your progress and offer academic and pastoral support. In welcome week you are also paired with a peer mentor, a medical student from a year above, for informal advice on studying and everyday student life.

The medical school has its own support for problems that affect your studies, including academic difficulties, physical and mental health, disability, and personal or financial issues. This sits alongside support from the central university and from your college: Lancaster is a collegiate university, and every student belongs to a college. The MBChB Hub is an online resource with information about the course.

Support continues on placement. At Morecambe Bay hospitals you can go to the trust's undergraduate team or your supervisors, and use its occupational health service. When the school described its finals OSCE to the GMC in 2023, students who failed met a senior staff member to go through their feedback and agree a support plan.