The Leicester Medicine course

Teaching is integrated, which at Leicester means every subject is learned in a clinical context. Instead of separate anatomy, physiology and pharmacology courses, much of Phase 1 is organised by body system, such as the cardiovascular or respiratory system. Each system unit covers how it is built, how it works, how it goes wrong and how doctors assess and treat it.

The programme specification says large lectures are kept to a minimum. Much of your contact time is spent working in groups with expert tutors, because the school wants you to build the problem-solving and reasoning skills a doctor needs. You are also expected to organise your own study and reflect on how your skills are developing.

Eight themes run through the course and appear to some degree in every unit and placement. They are empathic patient-centred care; equality, diversity and inclusion; personal development and professional practice; and population and social sciences. The other four are clinical reasoning and biomedical principles; professional skills; patient safety and quality improvement; and working in teams with other professions.

In Phase 2 the style changes. You learn mainly by working with doctors in hospitals and GP practices. Workbooks and structured activities guide you through each placement, with procedural training and simulation built in, and every placement has clear outcomes describing what you should be able to do by graduation.

The school's advice to applicants is to treat the degree like a full-time job, roughly 9am to 5pm. A usual campus week has lectures and group work in either the morning or the afternoon, plus sessions on clinical skills or in the dissecting room. There is also plenty of time for your own study.

Self-study fills the gaps. It typically means reading books and journal articles, working on individual and group projects, preparing presentations and revising for exams. You can use the library and the study spaces in the halls of residence.

Anatomy is taught through full-body dissection of cadavers, the bodies of people who donated them for medical education; Leicester's donors are members of the public in the East Midlands. You work in a group of eight to ten students, and each group has its own cadaver. You need your own white coat for sessions in the dissecting room.

You dissect almost the whole body over years 1 and 2. You start by studying the body's tissues, then move on to dissecting whole body systems, such as the heart and blood vessels or the lungs and airways. In later years you return to the dissecting room to revise and consolidate what you learned. There are also dissection prizes for students who want to test their surgical skills.

The dissecting room is in the Maurice Shock Building, next to the George Davies Centre, and holds more than 250 students. Models, bones and preserved specimens are used to teach sectional anatomy, which means studying the body in slices, as it appears on scans. Large wall screens are linked to Apple TVs, and an audio-visual system broadcasts live dissections from a central demonstration area to every part of the room.

Anatomy is also spread through the body-system units rather than taught as one separate course. The musculoskeletal unit in year 1, for example, covers the bones, joints and muscles, and the blood and nerve supply of the arms, legs and spine. Year 2 has a unit on applied head and neck anatomy with an introduction to neuroanatomy, the structure of the brain and nerves.

Living anatomy matters too. In year 1 a Surface Anatomy unit teaches you how the body's structures relate to what you can see and feel on the surface, which is the basis of physical examination. The cardiovascular and musculoskeletal units also cover how doctors use imaging to assess the body.

You meet patients from year 1. During year 1 you train on hospital wards for the NHS Health Care Certificate, which teaches the key skills of the Care Certificate. That is the national standard for people new to health and social care support work, now set jointly by Skills for Care, Skills for Health and NHS England. Once qualified you can take paid healthcare assistant work in the NHS if you want to.

At the same time you start the CHDD course, the clinical skills strand that runs through years 1 and 2. Its full name sets out its aims: compassion, care of the whole person, and working out a diagnosis like a detective. You practise consultations and examinations first with simulated patients and volunteers, then with patients in the medical school and in hospitals.

Phase 1 also includes community attachments, which show how people's social and psychological circumstances affect their health and illness. In semesters 3 and 4, Practice-Based Learning takes you into hospitals and general practice to keep building your clinical skills with real patients.

To move into Phase 2 you must pass a formal clinical exam at the end of year 2. You also need to show you can perform the core Phase 1 skills, such as measuring vital signs and testing urine. From year 3 you are on placement full-time.

Leicester's exams are integrated, like its teaching. The course is not split into separately examined modules. Each year ends with combined assessments that you must pass to move on, and written papers are cumulative, so later exams can test anything you have learned since year 1. In years 1 and 2 you also get regular formative tests, which do not count but give you feedback.

Written papers use two formats. Single best answer (SBA) questions give a clinical scenario and several options, and you pick the best one. Short answer questions (SAQs) ask you to write brief answers. In year 1 the SBA and SAQ papers and an Integrated Understanding paper are combined into one mark. In year 2 the written mark covers both years.

In an OSCE, an examiner marks you at each timed station as you complete a task such as taking a history, examining a patient or explaining a diagnosis. Your year 1 OSCE is for practice. From year 2 each year has an OSCE you must pass, and year 2 adds an examiner-led practical assessment of how well you connect the Phase 1 topics.

Finals in year 5 have several parts, and all must be passed in the same academic year. They include both parts of the UK Medical Licensing Assessment (UKMLA), which every UK medical student must now pass to be licensed. The Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) is a national written exam set by the Medical Schools Council Assessment Alliance. The Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA) is Leicester's own final OSCE.

The GMC's 2024 review of the AKT describes it as two computer-based papers of 100 SBA questions, each lasting two hours, sat on consecutive days. Leicester runs it on university computers in campus computer labs. You also sit a separate short answer paper, which you must pass on its own.

The GMC approved Leicester's CPSA in April 2024. Its decision describes 16 ten-minute stations, each with two minutes' reading time, split into two circuits of eight on two non-consecutive days in the same week. To pass, you need the overall pass mark and passes in at least 12 of the 16 stations. You also sit a mock OSCE four to six weeks before the CPSA, and get a briefing on its format and pass criteria six months ahead.

• Year 5 also includes a Summative Review of Competence Progression: you need satisfactory reports from clinical supervisors and evidence of observed practice across a set number of outcomes.
• The school notes that all graduates must pass the Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA), a national online test of safe prescribing.
• The MBChB is unclassified, but the top 10% of each graduating year receive MBChB (Hons). This is judged on performance across the whole degree, with extra weight on the final-year exams.

For almost all of years 3 to 5 you work full-time in clinical settings. Placements run in hospitals in Leicester, across the county and in the wider region, plus attachments in general practice and the community. The course page describes the range as Leicester's big city hospitals and smaller district centres across the Midlands, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire.

In the city, Leicester's big hospitals are the three acute sites of University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, a long-standing NHS partner of the medical school. The school singles out Glenfield Hospital for its heart and lung care, and its Simulation Centre is on the Royal Infirmary site.

Expect to travel, especially in years 3 and 4, which the course page says is when most placement travel costs arise. The medical school currently gives some help towards these costs, but says this depends on its funding at the time.

Many students stay in the area after graduating. In 2026, about 41% of Leicester's 297 new doctors took foundation jobs in Leicester, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland. The figure comes from the local NHS deanery, which runs training for junior doctors, as reported by the university.

Student Selected Components (SSCs) let you study an area you choose in more depth, alongside the core course. Some are university-based, with topics such as medical ethics and law or a language. Others give you a new clinical experience or build on one you enjoyed, and some are projects, such as a quality improvement project in a clinical setting.

Your first SSC is a four-week block in year 3, which every student completes. To help you choose, you are invited to a Medicine Careers Fair, where clinicians, trainees and specialty representatives explain their day-to-day work, how training works and how to build a portfolio. The block includes a formative assessment, which does not count towards your marks but is designed to build your academic writing skills.

In year 5 you have a six-week block for either an elective or a further SSC. The elective lets you experience healthcare somewhere new, abroad or elsewhere in the UK, and the school says many students choose to travel. If you stay local, you can pick from a range of SSCs, which you might use to revisit a specialty you are thinking of as a career.

You can present your SSC at presentation days held for both the year 3 and year 5 blocks. Topics offered in 2024-25 ranged from anaesthesia, radiology and plastic surgery to global health, sports and exercise medicine and many general practice placements.

Intercalating means taking a year out of the medicine course to study for an extra degree, which makes your course six years long. At Leicester it is optional and actively encouraged. You can take a bachelor's degree (iBSc) after year 2 or year 3, or a master's degree (iMSc) after year 3.

Leicester runs five of its own intercalated master's programmes: Clinical Education, Health Law (an LLM, the law master's degree), Healthcare Management, Medical Research and Psychology. The Medical Research iMSc combines four taught modules in qualitative and quantitative research methods with a substantial research project. You can also intercalate at another university, which widens the choice.

The school's reasons to intercalate are practical. You get time to study one subject in depth and sometimes a chance to present or publish your work. The research skills also help later applications to the Specialised Foundation Programme (foundation jobs with time for academic work) and to specialty training. Leicester students apply through a local process on the course's online learning site.

You do not have to intercalate to get involved in research. The programme specification says many students find research projects through their placements. It also names student-led groups: LUMRS, a medical student research society supported by the Academy of Medical Sciences' INSPIRE programme, runs journal clubs (discussions of published research) and student conferences. The Medical Education Society is for students interested in teaching, and MEDRift involves students in developing and researching new technology for medical education.

The George Davies Centre is where you learn in the early years. As well as teaching, it is a base for Leicester's research into long-term conditions such as kidney disease, stroke, diabetes and chronic lung disease, and into patient safety. The medical school's Pastoral Support Unit is based there too.

The medical school's clinical skills and simulation centre, the Simulation Centre at Leicester, is in the Robert Kilpatrick Building on the Leicester Royal Infirmary hospital site. It opened in March 2016 and combines the school's clinical skills centre with a simulation centre.

The school's Clinical Skills Unit has mock-up hospital wards and intensive care units. Manikins called iStan and SimMan can be programmed to react as a critically ill patient might, and actors play patients. It lets you practise assessing and treating patients where a mistake cannot harm anyone.

Simulation continues into the clinical years, with sessions linked to the year 3 medicine and surgery apprenticeships. After finals, the centre is turned into a 22-bed ward. You are placed in a team of junior doctors that takes handover and runs the ward, a safe chance to experience being a first-year doctor.

Every student has a Personal Tutor, a member of academic or clinical staff who tutors your whole small group and helps you settle into university. There are scheduled meetings at set points in years 1 and 2, and many tutors meet their groups more often and informally, over coffee or a dog walk. In years 3 to 5 you have a Clinical Academic Tutor, who helps you adjust to clinical learning and offers career advice.

The Pastoral Support Unit (PSU) is the medical school's own welfare team. It supports your social, emotional, mental and physical health through face-to-face or online appointments, and it offers on-site support during some hospital placement blocks. The school says more than 80% of its students use it at some point.

The Academic Support Unit (ASU) helps with studying efficiently, revision strategies and exam technique, including one-to-one appointments. The GMC's 2024 review of Leicester's final OSCE describes what happens if you fail it. An ASU tutor, a senior clinician with a special interest in academic support, goes through your scores and examiner feedback with you. Resitting students also get group teaching, revision sessions and a practice OSCE with feedback.

Outside the timetable, LUSUMA, the students' union medical association, is run by students and organises social events, sports clubs and interest groups. You can also volunteer through the MedReach programme with local school pupils, student groups such as Teddy Bear's Hospital and Medsin, or Project Light, which works with local homeless charities.