The Nottingham Medicine course

Because the curriculum is spiral, you meet each topic several times rather than once, with more clinical detail and responsibility each time. Science and clinical skills are taught together from the start, so the science behind a symptom such as chest pain sits alongside learning how to ask a patient about it and examine them.

In years 1 and 2 most teaching happens on University of Nottingham campuses. Alongside lectures, the science is also taught through integrated case-based learning (CBL), where a small group works through a patient case and learns the science needed to understand it. The typical week below shows how the hours split between lectures, small-group work, skills and simulation sessions, and structured personal study.

From year 3 the balance flips, and most of your learning happens on clinical placement. Placement blocks alternate with time back on campus, where academic teaching continues. As you get closer to graduating you are expected to set more of your own learning goals and direct more of your own study.

Throughout the course you have regular meetings with an educational supervisor, who helps you plan your learning and reviews how you are getting on. Your progress towards the EPAs goes into an electronic portfolio that you build from year 1. By the final year it is a running record of the skills you have practised.

For years 1 and 2 the university publishes the typical make-up of a week, adding up to around 14 to 20 contact hours. Outside these sessions you are expected to keep learning on your own: preparing for workshops, reading, completing portfolio tasks, working on presentations and revising for exams.

From year 3 there is no standard campus week. Your timetable follows the hospital or GP team you are attached to on placement.

• Four to six hours of lectures.
• Two to four hours of small group work.
• Two to four hours of simulation and clinical skills sessions.
• Six to eight hours of structured personal study.
• In year 2, one full day a week of primary care clinical teaching.
• Up to one hour a month of one-to-one meetings with your educational supervisor.

Anatomy is named as a core part of year 2's Science of Medicine module. You study it alongside physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology, working through the body systems, such as the heart and circulation or the lungs.

The Medical School building at QMC houses an anatomy suite, which the School of Medicine's facilities page describes as a suite for full-body dissection.

The bodies used to teach anatomy come from people who chose to leave their body to the university after death. The university accepts these donations under a licence from the Human Tissue Authority, the national regulator for the use of human tissue.

In year 1 you learn the basics of working with patients: how a consultation works, how to take a history and how to carry out a physical examination. You practise these through realistic scenarios, and you log your first EPA milestones, such as basic patient interviews, in your portfolio.

Regular contact with real patients starts in year 2, when you spend one day every week in primary care. The university lists NHS primary care providers across Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire as part of where years 1 and 2 are taught.

From year 3 clinical work becomes the main part of your week, first in hospital medicine, surgery and specialties, then in year 4 in areas such as child health, women's health and general practice. The 2027 course overview also names emergency medicine among the clinical areas you rotate through. Each rotation asks more of you than the last.

You are assessed through written, practical and oral exams, which may include computer-based tests and clinical skills exams. You also build and maintain an electronic portfolio that evidences the skills and knowledge you gain, including your EPA milestones.

In your final year you sit the UK Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA), overseen by the GMC. Since 2024-25 every UK medical degree has had to include a pass in the MLA. At Nottingham it is built into your final assessments, so there is no separate exam to sit after the degree.

The MLA has two parts. The Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) is a computer-based exam of medical knowledge applied to patients: two papers of 100 single best answer questions, each lasting two hours, sat on consecutive days. In a single best answer question you choose the one best option from a list.

The Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA) is an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). You move round a circuit of timed stations, each testing a task such as examining a patient, explaining a diagnosis or carrying out a procedure, with an examiner marking each one.

When the GMC checked Nottingham's finals for the MLA in 2024, it found both parts met its requirements. The OSCE then had 15 ten-minute stations, including a rest station, over two days, with trained actors in consultation and professionalism stations and plans to use real patients with physical signs. Those details describe the course before the 2026 redesign, and the new course may organise its exams differently.

Under that previous course, year 4 also had a knowledge exam and an OSCE that you had to pass to progress. Final-year students sat the Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA), a national online test of safe prescribing, although passing it was not a condition of graduating. Every new doctor must still pass the PSA by the end of the first foundation year.

Your placements take place on campus and in hospitals, GP surgeries and community services across Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. The School of Medicine says its medicine courses use more than 200 GP surgeries across the region. The course page names the hospitals below, plus the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire healthcare trusts.

From year 3 your academic year starts in mid-August. You spend an average of 36 hours a week on placement, which can include shifts and weekends, and blocks of placement alternate with time back on campus.

The School of Medicine's placement map for all its medicine courses also shows hospitals in Lincolnshire, but the A100 course page lists only the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire sites below.

The course page reminds you to budget for living costs such as travel and accommodation, and for smart clothes to wear in clinical settings.

Student selected components are the parts of a medical course where you choose the topic. At Nottingham they start as choices inside core modules in years 1 and 2. In years 3 and 4 they become whole modules: Enrichment in year 3, then a Student Selected Module and a Project Student Selected Module in year 4.

Enrichment and the year 4 Student Selected Module can each be clinical or non-clinical. Because a project started in Enrichment can continue into the year 4 Project module, you can spend parts of two years on one research question.

In the final year you may have the opportunity of an elective, a placement of your choosing in the UK or abroad. It can be in a different healthcare setting, in another area of professional development or in research, and is a chance to see how medicine is practised elsewhere.

The Medical School opened in 1970 as part of Queen's Medical Centre and is the School of Medicine's main hub. It sits across the A52 from University Park, joined by a pedestrian footbridge. Inside are lecture theatres, seminar rooms, labs, computer suites, the anatomy suite, a medical imaging unit and the Greenfield Medical Library.

The Clinical Skills Centre is on D floor of QMC, in the link corridor between the Medical School and the hospital's South Block. It is used to teach and assess clinical skills and is shared by students of medicine, nursing, midwifery, pharmacy, physiotherapy and dietetics.

For the new course the university announced a Clinical Teaching Centre on University Park in July 2025. It was costed at £15.3m and due to open in summer 2026, with 2,900 square metres of immersive simulation suites, clinical skills zones, interactive classrooms and study and social space. The 2027 course page also lists a newly designed clinical examination centre.

You have a personal tutor who supports your academic and personal development and can point you to specialist help. In the early years, senior tutors are there for anything you would rather not raise with your tutor. In the clinical years, clinical sub-deans take on that role and can help with academic, pastoral or placement problems.

Counsellors and wellbeing officers are based at clinical sites across the region, so help is close by while you are on placement. A director of student wellbeing oversees welfare across the school and steps in for complex situations.

The student-run Medics Society (MedSoc) pairs each new student with a mentor from the year above through its Medic Parents scheme. It also runs a wider peer support scheme and peer-led teaching and revision sessions, and its committee includes a welfare officer and an international students officer.

If you have a disability or health condition, the school works with the university's disability support team on a support plan. It sets out reasonable adjustments, such as extra time, and you get a key contact in the School of Medicine. International students get named staff contacts and a targeted induction course.

For the course that ran before the 2026 redesign, the school told the GMC in 2024 that it held practice exams with feedback before the real ones. Students who struggled in them were invited to a one-to-one meeting with its remediation team to agree a personal action plan.