The Peninsula (Plymouth) Medicine course

Plymouth's programme specification describes the curriculum as spiral and integrated. Integrated means science, clinical skills and professional development are taught together around patients, rather than as separate blocks of theory followed by practice. The early years mix introductory and more advanced material, but from year 3 everything is pitched at the level of the final year of an honours degree.

In years 1 and 2, teaching is built around clinical cases and patient stories. You work through them in structured small-group activities, backed up by plenary sessions for the whole year group, workshops and supported independent study. Year 1 introduces the science of health and wellbeing and why it matters for patients. Year 2 turns to pathology, meaning how disease damages the body, and to the human and social impact of illness.

In years 3 and 4 most learning moves into hospitals and GP practices, where you learn from patients with clinicians supervising you. You follow patient pathways, learning each condition through the journeys patients make across the health service. Lectures, seminars, workshops and small groups run alongside to link what you see back to the science. In year 5 the emphasis shifts to learning on the job, in primary care (GP and community services) and secondary care (hospitals).

Anatomy is taught mainly in the Life Sciences Resource Centre (LSRC) in the Portland Square Building. Its centrepiece is a set of Anatomage tables: large touchscreen tables showing digital human bodies built from real anatomical data and CT scans. You can peel back layers of tissue, rotate the body, isolate an organ and compare healthy anatomy with disease, and you can use the tables whenever the LSRC is open.

Alongside the tables you use 3D anatomical models that fit together like jigsaws, custom-printed molecular models, and ultrasound simulators that recreate a patient's landmarks and scan images. A team of surface-anatomy models, who are living people, act as your first patients. With them you learn to find landmarks by touch while talking to the person you are examining, which you later need in clinical exams.

When the school bought its first virtual dissection table in 2015, it said its anatomy teaching was designed to work from the outside in, on living people, rather than on cadavers. The resources it describes today follow the same pattern: digital dissection, anatomical models, imaging and living surface-anatomy models.

You meet patients from the very start of year 1. In years 1 and 2, community and general practice placements show you how care works outside hospital. You meet patients and people who use local services, and learn from the health and social care professionals who support them.

Much of your early hands-on practice happens in simulation first. Year 1's Clinical Practice module teaches you to take a medical history. It also has you practise basic examinations, simple procedures and basic life support in a simulated setting before you use them with patients.

From year 3 the balance flips, and most of your time is spent in hospital, general practice and community settings. By year 5 you are working inside the clinical team rather than observing it.

Every year has its own knowledge modules: Medical and Human Sciences 1a and 1b in year 1, then Medical Knowledge 2 to 5. The 2025/26 programme specification describes the year 1 and 2 tests as Medical Science Assessments, tied to that year's teaching. In years 3 and 4 you sit Applied Medical Knowledge tests, mapped to the GMC blueprint of what a new doctor must know. Each comes with individual feedback on the areas you need to work on.

When the GMC reviewed the school's knowledge testing in 2024, it described a progress-testing model. A progress test is pitched at the level of a new doctor and repeated through the course, so your score should rise as you learn. At that time students in years 1 to 4 sat four tests a year, and by the final year had answered at least 2,000 questions. Because the newer specification ties the year 1 and 2 tests to that year's teaching, this pattern may have changed.

Clinical skills are examined in an Integrated Structured Clinical Examination (ISCE), Plymouth's version of the OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination). You rotate through stations with real or simulated patients and are marked on communication, patient assessment, diagnosis, management planning and procedures. You must also show competence in an agreed set of examinations and procedures, first practised in the skills lab and then assessed with real patients on placement.

Professionalism is judged throughout the course by clinical and community supervisors, academic tutors and small-group facilitators, who look at your teamwork, organisation, reflection and patient-centred care. Structured reflective writing counts towards these judgements. On placement, clinical reasoning assessments, clinical evaluation exercises and case-based discussions test how you gather information from patients and plan their care.

Medical degrees awarded by UK universities from 2024-25 must include a pass in the MLA, which has two parts: the AKT and the CPSA. In 2023 the GMC found that Plymouth's CPSA met its requirements. It was then sat in year 4 as a sequential exam: everyone took eight stations over two days, and students who failed or were borderline took eight more stations on a further day.

Each station lasted 22 minutes, with two minutes of reading time, used trained simulated patients rather than real ones, and included a professionalism mark. Because of the two-phase design there was no separate resit within the year. Workplace-based assessments with real patients follow in year 5.

• Applied Knowledge Test: a nationally set, computer-based exam of single-best-answer questions (you pick the best of several options). In 2024 the GMC reported that it was the only knowledge exam that counted in year 5, and that final-year students sat four practice progress tests before it.
• Prescribing Safety Assessment: required in year 5.
• Progression: you normally need to pass every module to move up a year. Failing one module in years 1 to 4 means repeating the whole year, failing more than one can lead to removal from the course, and you cannot repeat the same year twice.
• Merit and Distinction: the BMBS can be awarded with Merit or Distinction based on year 5 results in Medical Knowledge 5 and Clinical and Professional Practice. Only students who passed every year at the first attempt are eligible.

Placements run across the south west of England, in hospitals, GP practices and community services. For years 1 and 2 you are based in Plymouth. From year 3 to year 5, placements are organised around three areas, each built on a partner NHS trust: Plymouth, Torbay and South Devon, and Somerset.

Every student spends at least one of those years based in Torbay or Taunton. The school describes these as extended placements of up to a year, rotating around its sites, and you also travel out from the main hospitals to GP practices. The university says students arrange their own accommodation on placement, and the Faculty of Health lists placement travel and accommodation among costs that tuition fees do not cover.

Every hospital, community and GP provider works to a formal agreement with the university that sets out the teaching hours, supervision, staff training and assessment on that placement. Each clinical area has a named Clinical Teacher Lead. You can contact them about problems such as a timetable change or a patient safety concern, and each placement opens with an introduction to its learning objectives and assessments.

Student-selected components (SSCs) are modules where you pursue an interest outside the core curriculum while building general skills such as research, communication and project management. On the current course page there is one in each of years 2 to 5, each with its own focus.

Some SSCs happen on placement. The faculty's partnerships with Devon Integrated Care Board (the NHS body that plans and funds health services in Devon) and local trusts provide SSC placements and shadowing as well as clinical placements.

The elective comes in year 5. You plan a placement in the UK or overseas, in a setting of your choice that the school agrees, and use it to bring your learning together in a different social or cultural context. One graduate featured on the course page spent four weeks with a dermatology team in a public hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal.

• Year 2 (30 credits): research skills, such as searching the literature, evaluating and presenting evidence, forming research questions and managing a project, plus the doctor's role as an educator.
• Year 3 (30 credits): communication, research and critical thinking, with a focus on doctors as advocates for health and on working with patients and the public.
• Year 4 (30 credits): quality improvement and patient safety, with leadership, teamwork and peer assessment.
• Year 5 (10 credits): the elective, a period of study you design yourself.

Intercalating means taking a year out of medicine to earn an extra degree. At Plymouth it is optional and selective: some students are offered the chance at the end of year 4, then return to start year 5 a year later.

You can join the third year of another undergraduate course, leading to a BSc or BA, or take a one-year master's degree. The university's own list includes intercalated BScs in Critical Care and in Urgent and Emergency Care, and a BSc in Medical Sciences. Master's options include Global Health, Expedition and Marine Medicine, Clinical Education and Clinical Research, and arts and humanities options such as History, English and Music are also listed.

Places on these programmes depend on their entry requirements and the programme lead's approval. Plymouth medical students get guidance from their own programme team on how to apply.

The Portland Square Building on the main campus is where most year 1 and 2 teaching happens. It houses the Life Sciences Resource Centre, whose teaching rooms and resources you can also use for private study, group work and peer teaching.

The Clinical Skills Resource Centre is in the John Bull Building on the Derriford campus at Plymouth Science Park, in the north of the city. Its teaching rooms have examination couches and equipment trolleys, so a tutor can teach a skill such as a neurological examination to eight students at once. Simulation suites recreate emergency department bays and resuscitation rooms.

SimMan, a computer-controlled manikin, shows clinical signs and reacts to what you do. Staff run each scenario from a control room behind a one-way mirror and record it for debriefing afterwards.

A bookable Supported Student Learning room has part-body trainers for taking blood, inserting a cannula (a thin tube into a vein), taking arterial blood samples, giving injections, handling sharps safely and suturing. A scrub room teaches surgical scrubbing, gowning and gloving before your first operating theatre placements.

The programme specification says each of the three clinical areas has its own Clinical Skills Resource Centre, so skills practice continues when you are based in Torbay or Taunton.

Academic Tutors guide how you learn, go through your assessment results and feedback with you, and give the first level of help if you fall behind. Problems and agreed solutions are written into a learning contract or action plan, and you keep your assessment feedback in a portfolio.

If difficulties continue, Senior Academic Tutors step in, and a specialist Remediation Team works with students on study skills and on wider personal and health issues. An Academic Review Group meets every term to look at each student's progress and recommend support.

Pastoral Tutors help with non-academic worries and can point you to services such as student counselling. They are based on the university campus and at the John Bull Building. There are also Pastoral Tutors at the acute hospitals in South Devon and Somerset, so there is someone to talk to when you are based away from Plymouth.

Some tutors are practising doctors: University Hospitals Plymouth offers its senior clinicians academic and pastoral tutor roles. Outside the formal system, the student medical society, Peninsula MedSoc, pairs each new first-year with two second-year students as a first point of contact and runs student-led teaching.