The Manchester Medicine course

Manchester's approach is active learning through themed cases. Each week is built around a clinical scenario, chosen to cover key science and common health problems in the UK today. Lectures and webinars, short online learning modules, practicals and anatomy sessions then support what the case asks you to find out.

In Years 1 and 2 the cases are taught through team-based learning (TBL), a structured form of small-group work. You belong to a community of practice of about 60 students with several facilitators, and inside it a team of six that stays together for the semester. After Semester 1 your community is reshuffled to match the hospital campus you have been allocated, so you learn to work with new people.

In Years 3 and 4 the themed case approach continues around your placements. Each week you work through online cases, then discuss a case you have not seen before with an expert tutor. Year 5 teaching is different. You get half a day to a day each week of compulsory workshops, lectures and seminars, covering prescribing, communication, ethics, blood transfusion, wound management and simulation.

The course is built from four strands that run alongside each other: the science foundations of medicine, clinical practice, your own project path, and personal and professional development. The last of these means keeping a reflective portfolio in every year of the course. You gather evidence against set learning outcomes and discuss it with your Academic Advisor, and those meetings are compulsory.

A Year 1 week follows a set rhythm. On Monday morning the whole year group meets for a compulsory interactive opening session, where a clinical scenario unfolds with symptoms, test results, multimedia and sometimes simulated patients. By the end of the session you have started working out what you need to learn that week.

Through the week you study the case using online modules, lecture presentations and webinars, alongside timetabled anatomy, practicals, consultation skills and early clinical experience. The week ends with your team-based learning session. Your personal timetable sits on the course's online system, 1Med, and can change at short notice.

Year 3 looks very different. On placement blocks you are expected to spend about 60% of your time in the clinical environment and the rest in mandatory teaching or private study. When nothing is timetabled, you go to your ward and ask to see suitable patients. Fridays hold your themed case discussion and other set teaching.

• Year 3: a weekly clinical debrief with a GP tutor.
• Year 3: in each of the four five-week blocks, at least four hours of clinical work outside Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm is recommended, so you see out-of-hours care.
• Year 5 medicine, surgery and acute placements: shift work across the seven-day week where the placement allows.

Anatomy at Manchester is taught with real human bodies. Across Years 1 and 2 you dissect a whole donated body yourself, and you also study prosections. A prosection is a body part already dissected by experts, so you can learn the structures without cutting them yourself.

The dissecting room in the Stopford Building is a large space where up to 40 body donors are used to teach anatomy region by region. Donors are people who chose to leave their bodies to the University for teaching and research. Access is regulated under the Human Tissue Act 2004, so before you start you attend an introductory talk and sign a strict code of conduct.

In the room you must wear a lab coat and gloves, keep your phone in your bag and never photograph specimens. You also use potted specimens showing common diseases and a large collection of bones. You compare these with X-rays, CT and MRI scans, so you learn how anatomy appears on clinical images.

A dedicated ultrasound room has 20 handheld scanners and two larger portable machines. For study away from the lab there are Anatomage tables, which are life-size touchscreen virtual dissection tables, and glasses-free 3D displays. You also get Complete Anatomy and Acland's video atlas, plus digitised histology slides you can view from anywhere.

• Teaching is delivered by anatomy academics working with GMC-registered Clinical Teaching Fellows.
• The anatomy department works closely with the Manchester Surgical Skills and Simulation Centre on the same site.

Your first patients are simulated. From Year 1 you practise consultations in the Consultation Skills Learning Centre with trained actors and tutors. You cannot visit any real clinical setting until your DBS (criminal records) check is complete, and occupational health appointments for vaccinations start in your first semester.

Real patients arrive in Semester 2 of Year 1, when you make two GP surgery visits in pairs, each lasting six hours, followed by a structured group debrief. In Year 2 you make two more full-day GP visits and spend four days at the hospital campus you will join in Year 3. You also join a half-day community placement with health, social care and education professionals.

From Year 3 you are a member of the clinical team, starting with a four-week Introduction to Clinical Learning that front-loads examination and procedural skills. By Year 5 you carry out, under supervision, almost all the tasks of a Foundation Year 1 doctor. Anything that needs registration with the GMC is off limits: you cannot authorise a real prescription, and you cannot sign statutory forms such as a death or cremation certificate or a sick note.

Manchester uses formative assessments, which tell you how you are doing, and summative ones, which decide whether you progress and normally come at the end of each year. Most results are graded Unsatisfactory, Low Pass, Satisfactory, Honours or Distinction, and knowledge test pass marks are set against the performance of the cohort's strongest students.

Knowledge is tested with single best answer questions, where you choose the best of five options and a wrong answer simply scores zero. Years 1 and 2 each have two semester tests. From Year 1 to Year 4 you also sit the Progress Test, 125 questions in 2.5 hours, with 50 extra questions on that year's teaching in the summer sitting of Years 3 and 4.

Clinical skills are tested in the Clinical Competency Assessment (CCA), which is Manchester's name for an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). That is a circuit of timed stations where examiners watch you take a history, examine a patient or explain a diagnosis. Years 1 and 2 each end with a 10-station CCA, and you must pass at least six stations. From Year 3 the CCAs that count have 16 stations of eight minutes, with 90 seconds to prepare for each, and you must pass at least 12.

Since 2024-25 every UK medical degree must include a pass in the Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA), made up of an Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) and a clinical and professional skills assessment. At Manchester both are built into Year 5 Finals, so there are no extra exams. The AKT is two papers of 100 questions, two hours each, and the GMC has approved the Year 5 CCA as the skills part.

You are also assessed at work. Each placement must be signed off as satisfactory using your logbook, and across Years 3 to 5 you complete Undergraduate Procedural Skills Assessments (UPSAs). These are practical procedures such as taking blood, catheterisation and arterial blood gas sampling, signed off by qualified staff. Written reports assess your projects, and your professional behaviour is assessed too.

The degree can be awarded with Honours to no more than the top 15% of graduates. Under the rules for students graduating from 2027-28, this is based on standardised scores from Years 3, 4 and 5, weighted roughly evenly. Year 3 counts for 29%, Year 4 for 35% and Year 5 for 36%.

For Years 3 to 5 you are based at one of four Clinical Education Campuses. Each is an NHS teaching hospital trust with its own undergraduate department, and it organises your placements across its main hospital, linked district general hospitals, GP practices and community services. Each campus normally takes about 20% to 27% of the year group.

You cannot simply pick your campus, but before allocation you can apply for approved extenuating circumstances, and a panel of clinical and University staff decides each case. Some reasons count at allocation and again later if your life changes. They cover being the parent or legal guardian of a child under 18 who mainly lives with you, or the recognised main carer of a disabled person. A disability confirmed by the University's disability service also counts, if you must have ongoing follow-up care in one place.

Other reasons count only at the first allocation. If you lived at your parents' or your own home in Manchester or Preston before applying, you can ask for one of the three Greater Manchester campuses or Preston. You must plan to keep living there for money reasons for the whole course. Strict religious requirements that cannot be met at another campus, and elite sport for students on a University Sport Scholarship, are also considered. Every request is granted only where the campus has space, so none is guaranteed.

You can also say you would prefer Preston, and the School tries to place you there. Students who ask normally make up a minority of those placed at Preston, but if too many ask, the extra students are allocated at random to the other campuses. Everyone else is placed by an anonymous random process, confirmed in December of Year 1. The University strongly advises you not to buy or commit to long-term housing before then, because owning property will not change your allocation.

Travel is part of the course. You are expected to live within easy commuting distance of your campus, and many placements mean travelling there and back each day. Some specialty placements, such as neurology, infectious diseases and ophthalmology, may be away from your campus. Some travel bursaries are available in Years 3 to 5, and for distant placements the campus may provide a bursary or accommodation.

Placements also reach specialist centres in oncology, women's and children's health, neurology, dermatology and ophthalmology. The University names The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust and the neurology and dermatology centres at the Northern Care Alliance. Across the North West there are more than 700 community placements, including in central Manchester, Lancashire and Wigan.

At the end of Year 3 comes the student-selected clinical placement. You list preferences from a menu of placements, or occasionally arrange your own, and spend the block immersed in one specialty, supervised by a senior doctor or GP. The 2025/26 programme handbook describes it as a three-week placement, while the course page for 2027 entry calls it four weeks, so check the length for your year. It must be within Manchester's placement region, and you write a 300-word reflection on how it shaped your thinking about your career.

The elective is a four-week placement at the end of Year 4, and it can be anywhere in the world. Most students go abroad, but you can stay in the UK or even locally. You arrange it yourself, need formal School approval before travelling, and need a supervisor at consultant level or in independent practice who is not a relative or family friend.

You can split the elective between two hosts if you spend at least two weeks at each. Research can be part of it, as long as at least half the time is spent with patients and the host already has ethics approval. Some countries, including the USA, Canada and Australia, may need at least 12 months' notice.

You pay for the elective yourself. The School points students to external grants it advertises during the course, the Medical Schools Council list of elective bursaries, and Turing Scheme funding for study abroad. If you receive the NHS Bursary, you may also be able to claim some travel and extra accommodation costs.

Intercalation means pausing your medical degree to complete a separate degree, then returning to medicine. At Manchester it is optional. You can apply to take a one-year BSc after Year 2, 3 or 4, or a master's degree after Year 3 or 4. Most students choose to intercalate after Year 3 or Year 4.

BSc students join the final year of an existing Manchester degree. Options include Biochemistry, Biomedical Sciences, Genetics, Global Health, Immunology, Medical Biochemistry, Neuroscience and Medical Physiology. Some courses need you to have completed at least a year of clinical medicine, and most include a large research component based in a laboratory or on a literature review.

Master's options include Genomic Medicine, Precision Medicine, Oncology Research and Occupational Medicine. Most students intercalate at Manchester. You can apply to another UK university if its course differs enough, but you may not be eligible for the full range of bursary funding.

For future clinician-scientists there is a Cancer Research UK-funded MB-PhD. You take a three-year cancer-focused PhD between Years 3 and 4 and graduate with both an MBChB and a PhD. Projects span areas such as genomics, immunology, physics, data science, AI and clinical trials.

In Years 1 and 2 nearly everything happens in the Stopford Building on Oxford Road. It houses the anatomy dissecting room, the Consultation Skills Learning Centre, teaching laboratories, computer clusters and the Stopford library, which holds core texts for first and second years.

The Consultation Skills Learning Centre has 24 consultation rooms set up like hospital outpatient clinics and GP surgeries. Here you practise taking histories and examining patients with classmates and simulated patients, and practise clinical skills on SimMan, a lifelike patient simulator manikin.

The first-floor teaching laboratory is equipped mainly for physiology and pharmacology practicals. The second-floor laboratory has microscopes for studying tissues, plus equipment for biochemistry, microbiology and molecular work.

In the clinical years you are given an iPad, which holds your logbook, placement sign-off forms and learning materials. Each hospital campus has its own undergraduate facilities. At Preston, for example, these include clinical skills labs, simulation and resuscitation rooms with high-fidelity manikins, education centres in Preston and Chorley, libraries and student common rooms.

In Years 1 and 2 the Student Pastoral Support team in the Stopford Building helps with personal, family, health or money worries, and with doubts about studying medicine. You also have an Academic Advisor from the start of Year 1, with meetings every semester, and Year 1 includes study skills workshops on time management, active study and exam technique.

The peer mentoring scheme, known as Mummies and Daddies, supports new first years with trained Year 2 mentors and a team of Year 3 student coordinators. There are also mentors for international students and for mature students or those who have taken time out.

When you move to your hospital campus, a Clinical Academic Advisor, who is an experienced clinician, takes over and stays with you until graduation. Each campus has a Hospital Dean, an Associate Hospital Dean for pastoral support and a local support team. A base hospital peer mentoring scheme, run by students a year ahead, helps you settle into clinical life.