The Leeds Medicine course

Leeds calls its approach Active Learning: you are in front of clinicians, patients and healthcare teams from the start of year 1, not only in a lecture theatre. Case-based learning is one strand of it, where a patient scenario comes with set learning outcomes and a facilitator keeps the group moving through them. Lectures, tutorials, anatomy practicals, clinical skills sessions and placement sit around it.

In years 1 and 2 the timetable is dominated by campus teaching. The year 1 Body Systems unit alone runs 79 one-hour lectures, 14 workshops, 17 seminars and 8 tutorials. From year 3 the weight shifts: year 3 Campus to Clinic is costed at roughly 650 hours of clinical practice against 39 lectures.

Several strands run the length of the course, under names you will see current students use. Campus to Clinic covers history taking, examination and practical procedures, and in years 1 and 2 it is called CARES, for Clinical Assessment, Reasoning, Ethics and patient Safety. IDEALS, for Innovation, Development, Enterprise, Leadership and Safety, covers professionalism, leadership and careers. ENQUIRE covers research, audit and service evaluation. The rebuilt course regroups them into its four modules.

From year 3 a framework called SAFER-MEDIC structures how you work through a patient encounter. MEDIC is the encounter itself: Meeting, Examining, Diagnosing, Investigating and Concluding. SAFER runs before, during and after it: Safety, Awareness, First Principles, Ethics and Research. You have to engage with the sessions and complete the assignment to pass year 3, then keep using it in years 4 and 5.

Your record of clinical work lives in PebblePad, an online portfolio, and course material sits in Minerva, the virtual learning environment. Placement feedback goes through a mobile app, so a supervisor can sign it off at the bedside.

In year 1 the placement slot is Tuesday morning, 9.00am to 12.30pm. In year 2 it becomes a full Thursday, 9.00am to 4.30pm. The rest of those weeks is campus teaching.

Year 3 weeks depend on the rotation. On medicine, elderly medicine and surgery you attend Monday to Thursday for four weeks, then Monday and Tuesday in the fifth. Primary care is the same shape a day shorter: Monday to Wednesday for four weeks, then Monday and Tuesday in the fifth, with central primary care teaching on the Thursdays.

The primary care tutor guide for 2024/25 shows what a GP week holds. Mornings might be a healthcare assistant clinic, a nurse clinic, a session with the practice pharmacist, home visits or minor surgery. Afternoons alternate between a teaching surgery with your tutor and one where you see the patient first.

Year 4 rotations open with a teaching week, apart from Continuing Care and Cancer, which teaches every Monday. Year 5 placements run Monday to Friday, and every one except general practice needs at least one out-of-hours session.

Leeds teaches anatomy in a dissection room. The year 1 science unit lists applying anatomical dissection techniques among its skills outcomes, and the year 2 module has students working there in small groups with demonstrators.

Anatomy is spread across units rather than sitting in one block. Year 1 starts with anatomical terminology and embryology, then the gross anatomy and histology of six body systems. Year 2 concentrates it: Control and Movement works through the limbs and vertebral column, then the brain, spinal cord, cranial nerves and the autonomic nervous system.

It is examined with a spot test, a circuit of stations where you identify structures on specimens and images against the clock. The year 1 summative spot test is 78 questions across 26 stations and counts for 24.5 per cent of the year 1 exam.

Anatomy is taught next to radiology and surface anatomy, so you learn to find a structure on a scan as well as on a specimen. Nine online tasks with feedback come through year 2, one at the end of each anatomy topic.

Patient contact starts in year 1, but not in the first term. Term 1 is campus-based and ends with compulsory preparation: e-learning on moving and handling, basic life support, infection prevention and chaperoning, plus a safeguarding lecture in December.

From January the placement runs in two eight-week blocks, one in a general practice and one in a hospital, and you swap halfway. The unit is costed at around 120 hours of placement across the year.

The handbook's sample hospital block gives a flavour. Week 1 is a consultant ward round and week 2 an observations round with a clinical support worker, practising pulse, blood pressure and early warning scores. Later weeks add an outpatient clinic and a morning shadowing a junior doctor.

Year 1 also includes community visits: you visit or interview a voluntary, community or faith sector organisation to see how it supports health outside the NHS. Students have worked with more than 250 such organisations in recent years.

Year 2 moves to full Thursdays, across four five-week rotations: two in general practice and two in hospital or a non-NHS provider. Mental health sessions sit inside one rotation and RRAPID workshops inside another. RRAPID stands for Recognising and Responding to Acute Patient Illness and Deterioration. A four-day placement follows the June exam.

Leeds splits assessment into two purposes. Assessment for learning is low-stakes practice with feedback: open-book question sets that open alongside each topic and stay open until it finishes, plus formative exams and sessions walking through how the year group answered. The year 2 anatomy tasks come at the end of each topic instead.

Assessment for progression is the exams and sign-offs. Every year has an Integrated Summative Exam of single best answer questions, where you pick the best of five options. Years 1 and 2 are two 120-question papers each, year 3 one 120-question paper over three hours and year 4 one 150-question paper. Year 1 adds the anatomy spot test.

An OSCE, or Objective Structured Clinical Examination, is a circuit of short timed stations where you examine or interview a real or simulated patient while an examiner marks against a checklist. Your first is at the end of year 3: 13 stations over two days.

Year 4 uses 24 stations in two sequences. Stations 1 to 14 come first, over two days, and you only sit stations 15 to 24 if that first block leaves the result open. Students who have clearly passed, and students who can no longer reach the pass mark, do not sit them.

The final year carries the UK Medical Licensing Assessment, which the GMC requires every UK medical degree awarded from 2024/25 onwards to include. The Applied Knowledge Test is two papers of 100 questions on consecutive days in January.

The Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment is the school's own finals, in two parts. Part 1 reviews your placement record: mandatory clinical skills evidenced in PebblePad, 12 mini-CEX entries and passes in five of your six placements. Part 2 is the finals OSCE, 13 marked stations over two days. The GMC judged both parts compliant, in November 2023 and June 2024.

• Grades run from A to F. You need D or better to progress, and A and B grades feed the points system for MBChB with Honours.
• If you fail the year 4 written exam or OSCE, you repeat the whole year rather than resit that one exam.
• Failing two or more clinical placements in a year stops you sitting the end-of-year exams.
• The 2026/27 calendar schedules a Prescribing Safety Assessment in late January of year 5, with a resit in March.

Placements are spread across West and North Yorkshire rather than gathered on one site. Allocations are published on SPARC, the school's placement website, and travel times are recalculated each summer from the campus postcode using the West Yorkshire Metro journey planner. In year 5 you cannot swap a rotation once allocations are agreed.

Coach transport is provided in the first two years, but the list of hospitals differs by year. In year 1 the school runs coaches to Bradford Royal Infirmary, the three Mid Yorkshire hospitals at Pinderfields, Dewsbury and Pontefract, and Calderdale Royal. In year 2 the coaches run to Bradford Royal Infirmary and Pinderfields only.

GP travel is covered by a contribution payment banded by journey time, and year 2 students sent to Harrogate or a Spire hospital get a separate payment. From year 3, hospital providers outside Leeds must offer either accommodation or travel expenses, though accommodation must be requested in advance.

The Leeds Institute of Medical Education also pays a lump sum towards travel: £80 in year 3, £90 in year 4 and £80 in year 5. Year 5 students on the NHS Bursary claim through that scheme instead. In year 3 the school asks for volunteers for three GP practices more than 90 minutes away.

You will also meet the abbreviation PIVO, for private, independent and voluntary organisations. These are the non-NHS placements: hospices, sexual health services run by social enterprises, and private hospitals. Years 2, 3 and 4 include them; years 1 and 5 do not. The extra daily payment for one is published only for years 3 and 4, and only when the provider sits outside central Leeds.

The elective is a six-week placement you arrange yourself, between years 4 and 5. It normally runs between July and September, inside an eight-week window, with the spare fortnight for travel or self-directed study. You plan it during year 4, and other dates are not approved.

You can go abroad or stay in the UK. Past Leeds students have worked in health centres, charities, universities and hospitals in Australia, China, Italy, Nepal, Samoa, Tanzania and Vanuatu. A scheme called Students Without Borders lets you learn French or Spanish well enough to work as a junior doctor.

Student-selected work is otherwise spread through the course. Year 1 ends with a project of your own choosing, years 2 and 3 each include a two-week project on patient and public involvement in research, and years 4 and 5 are the dissertation.

EXSEL, which stands for Excellence in Scholarship, Enterprise and Leadership, is a separate research route for a small number of students. Scholars are appointed in year 2 and hold a bursary each year until graduation, with extra funding for research and travel. Each has an academic mentor and in turn mentors a junior scholar.

Intercalation means stepping out of the MBChB for a year to take a whole extra degree, then coming back. At Leeds it is optional and normally taken after year 2, 3 or 4. The 2026 entry course page says up to half the year group intercalates.

Options inside the university run from bachelors to masters level. They include Zoology in Relation to Medicine and Veterinary Science, Sports Science in Relation to Medicine, and masters courses in international health, medical imaging and cancer biology. The school runs an intercalation fair each December.

Most classroom teaching happens in the Medical Teaching Centre, the hub for taught sessions in the School of Medicine. It has 2,500 seats across more than 60 classrooms and computer clusters, with lecture capture in every room so you can rewatch a demonstration.

Clinical skills teaching runs from level 9 of the Worsley Building, where the Skills and Simulation Team keeps its simulation equipment and ultrasound machines. There is an independent learning area you book in advance to practise alone or with a partner. The Health Sciences Library is in the same building.

Online, the school publishes TiME, its Technology in Medical Education site, with resources mapped to each part of the MBChB, virtual tours of more than 30 placement sites and virtual patients.

Every medical student is assigned a personal tutor, and for MBChB students that tutor is usually a doctor. They meet you regularly, follow your academic progress, and either help directly or point you at the right service. They also handle careers conversations.

First years are paired with a second-year student who mentors them, and each year group has its own named team: year 3, for example, has two heads of year and a coordinator. The Academic Sub-Dean approves planned absence from placement, and the university runs a counselling centre alongside the students' union advice centre.