The Lincoln Medical School Medicine course

The course uses case-based learning (CBL). Instead of studying anatomy, physiology and disease as separate subjects, you work through example patient cases, grouped into blocks of teaching across the year. Where it fits, each case has a biological side, a psychological side and a social side. So one case can teach you how an organ works, how illness affects a person's mind and how their circumstances affect their health.

Everything you learn sits in three modules that run through every year: Professional Knowledge, Professional Skills, and Professional Values and Behaviour. Broadly, the first covers medical science, the second covers clinical and communication skills, and the third covers your professional attitudes and behaviour. Because Professional Values and Behaviour is a module in its own right, your conduct is assessed every year, alongside your knowledge and skills.

The 2026-27 version of the course page names eight themes that run through all five years. They are clinical and communication skills, clinical reasoning, health equity, health education, public health, medical and healthcare leadership, medical ethics and law, and research and quality improvement. Clinical reasoning means working out what is wrong with a patient from the evidence in front of you. Health equity means fair access to good health for every group in society.

The balance shifts as you go. In Years 1 and 2 most learning is on campus, with some early clinical visits and teaching in clinical and communication skills. From Year 3 most of your learning happens on placement with local healthcare providers, and you return to campus for regular central teaching days on the theory. In the final year you sit the Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA), the national exam every UK medical degree must now include, and prepare to start work as a doctor.

The school's independence project pages say all teaching on the new course will be mapped to the GMC's Outcomes for Graduates. These are the standards every new UK doctor must meet. Teaching will also be mapped to the MLA content map, which lists the topics and skills the MLA can test.

Anatomy at Lincoln is taught through prosection, in the Anatomy Suite of the Ross Lucas Medical Sciences Building. A prosection is a part of a human body that a specialist has already dissected to show particular structures. You learn by studying these prepared specimens rather than dissecting a body yourself.

Alongside the specimens, the school has a collection of models of human body parts and a collection of bones, which you use throughout the course. Anatomy is not taught as a separate subject. Like physiology and disease, it is applied to the patient cases you work through in each block.

You meet patients from your first year. Years 1 and 2 are mostly on campus, but you make regular placement visits to general practices and hospitals. You also learn from scientists and practising doctors, and can question them about clinical outcomes and what their working lives are like.

Alongside the visits, you start learning clinical skills on campus from the beginning, such as talking with patients and examining them. You practise these in the clinical skills suite of the Ross Lucas Medical Sciences Building.

Year 3 is the turning point. You move from mostly university-based learning to mostly clinical learning, starting with ten-week placements in medicine, surgery, and primary and community care. By the end of Year 5 you are doing an assistantship, where you work as part of a clinical team and take on many of the tasks of a new doctor under supervision.

Each year you are assessed in the same three modules that organise your teaching: Professional Knowledge, Professional Skills, and Professional Values and Behaviour. The assessment methods below are the ones set out on the 2026-27 version of the course page. They change as you move from campus to placements.

In Years 1 and 2, assessment includes written assignments, multiple-choice exams, skills sign-offs and integrated structured clinical exams (ISCEs). A skills sign-off is when a tutor confirms you can carry out a particular skill correctly. An ISCE is a structured practical exam of your clinical skills, such as taking a history or examining a patient. Your professional attitudes are judged through portfolio work and through your engagement and conscientiousness.

In Years 3 to 5, your knowledge is tested through Applied Knowledge Tests, exams that check how you apply medical knowledge to patient problems. Your skills are tested through ISCEs and workplace-based assessments, where a clinician assesses how you work with real patients on placement. Your values and behaviour are judged through portfolio work and how you engage with placement activities.

From Year 3, each year's knowledge and skills exams come after that year's placement blocks. They are summative, which means they count towards whether you pass the year. Life support is the set of skills used when someone's breathing or heart stops. It is developed and assessed in a skills lab every year, with scenarios that grow more complex over the five years.

Both strands build up to the MLA in your final year. It has two parts. The Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) is a computer-based exam of single best answer questions, where you pick the best of several options. The Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA) is a practical exam of your clinical skills. Since the 2024-25 academic year, a UK medical degree must include a pass in the MLA to count as a medical qualification.

Your clinical training happens across Lincolnshire, through the school's links with local NHS trusts and with primary and community care. The three hospitals the school names as current placement sites are Lincoln County Hospital, Grantham and District Hospital, and Pilgrim Hospital in Boston. All three are run by United Lincolnshire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.

In Years 1 and 2 you make regular visits to GP surgeries and hospitals. From Year 3 placements take up most of your time, in the rotating blocks set out in the year-by-year section, with regular teaching days back on campus.

Many of the school's first graduates, who trained through the Nottingham partnership, did the clinical part of their course in Lincolnshire hospitals. When they graduated in 2024, some were due to start their careers as doctors in Lincolnshire hospitals, including Lincoln County Hospital.

You get several blocks of study you choose yourself. In Year 3, after your exams, there is one four-week SSC. In Year 4 there are two more four-week SSCs, and one of the two must be a clinical SSC, based in a clinical setting.

In Year 5, after your final exams, you spend six weeks on an elective, a placement of your own choosing. It sits alongside the six-week assistantship at the end of the course.

Most of your campus teaching happens in the Ross Lucas Medical Sciences Building on the Brayford Pool Campus, which sits on the Brayford Pool waterfront in the centre of Lincoln. The building was completed in March 2021 and cost £21 million. It has solar panels and a living wall, which is a wall covered in growing plants.

Inside are lecture theatres, laboratories, the prosection Anatomy Suite and a clinical skills suite. The clinical skills suite has consultation rooms set up to simulate a hospital, so you can practise talking to and examining patients in a realistic setting. The school's guidance for new students says you wear surgical scrubs in clinical skills sessions and on clinical visits, and a lab coat in the laboratories.

The first floor holds the building's library, which the university calls both the Ross Library and the Bio-Medical and Health Sciences Library. It brings together the university's collections in medicine, life sciences, pharmacy, chemistry, nursing, and allied health and social care, and has its own library staff. Study spaces include group rooms, booths, individual study desks called carrels, and quiet areas.

The school's guidance for new students says every student is given a personal tutor for the whole course. You meet them regularly to review your progress and set goals. In the early years you also keep a reflection portfolio for these meetings, a record of what you have learned and how you are developing.

The school also runs peer mentoring for all first-year students. Your mentor is a student at least a year ahead of you, trained to help you settle in and point you to the right support. On top of this, the course page lists regular feedback on your progress, structured development of your clinical skills, support on placement and the university's wellbeing services.

The school's guidance for new medical students explains how you can shape the course. Each year group has places for two student representatives, who sit on school committees. A Student Staff Forum, where representatives and staff discuss feedback, meets three times a year, and you can complete an anonymous survey on each module.

The Gateway Year route is a six-year version of the course that starts with an extra year, Year 0. It is open only to applicants from widening participation backgrounds, meaning groups less likely to go to university. That year comes with dedicated academic tutors, study skills support and structured feedback, to help you make the move into the full degree.