The Queen's University Belfast (QUB) Medicine course

In case-based learning, each case comes with a co-ordinated programme of lectures, seminars, practicals, laboratory work and clinical skills sessions. That way the science you meet in a lecture is tied to the patient problem your group is working on.

The curriculum is built as a spiral, meaning the same body systems come back at greater depth. In Years 1 and 2 you learn normal structure and function, with an introduction to disease. Year 3 is the second pass, with cases taught in the clinical setting. Year 4 is the third, looking at how the same systems present at different stages of life.

Four themes, which the school calls its Curriculum DNA, run through every year: Global and Population Health, Clinical Science and Practice, Achieving Good Medical Practice, and Teamwork for Safe Care. Each year also has a reflective practice unit, in which you write about your learning experiences and set yourself targets for improvement.

The balance shifts sharply over the five years. The first two years are mostly on campus, while by Year 3 almost all teaching is in hospitals and general practices, backed by live and recorded lectures. You log clinical learning and reflections in an ePortfolio and mobile app, MyProgress, which tutors also use to give you feedback from Year 1.

In Years 1 and 2 the timetable is built around the current case. One afternoon a week, from 2pm to 5pm, is set aside for Clinical Experience sessions with GP and hospital tutors, though each student attends only a set number of them. Family Attachment and GP tutorials take up five further afternoons in each year.

In Year 3 you are mostly in hospital. Northern Ireland's hospitals and community services are run by five regional Health and Social Care (HSC) Trusts, and your GP placement is in the same Trust area as your hospital. For one semester you spend a full Wednesday each week in general practice, 12 Wednesdays in all in 2026 to 2027. You are in a group of four to six students with the same GP tutor.

In final year your GP placement fills nine sessions a week, almost the whole working week, with a weekly group learning session led by a GP to discuss cases.

Anatomy at Queen's is taught through cadaveric dissection: you carefully cut through a body donated for teaching to expose and study its structures yourself. The school says this happens when enough specimens are available, so how much dissection you do depends on the number of donated bodies.

Teaching takes place in two refurbished gross anatomy laboratories with audio-visual equipment in the Medical Biology Centre. The same building has a virtual histology microscopy suite, where you examine digitised tissue slides on a screen, and two physiology teaching laboratories.

Anatomy is woven into the body systems rather than taught as a separate subject. In Year 1 it covers the heart, lungs, blood and the first part of the musculoskeletal system, including embryology and histology. In Year 2 you move on to the abdomen, pelvis, breast, endocrine glands, brain, spinal cord, skull and neck, and lower limb, and learn to describe specimens you have not seen before.

In its review for June 2025 to May 2026, the GMC set the school no requirements or recommendations. It did list dissection opportunities among the topics it wants an update on in the school's next submission, due in June 2027.

You meet patients from the start. The introductory unit of Year 1 includes your first patient encounters, an introduction to clinical skills and training in basic life support.

The Family Attachment scheme runs through Year 1. A GP tutor pairs students with a patient or family registered at the practice, and you keep in contact with them over the year. At five afternoon tutorials you discuss what you have learned, and with consent you can look at your patients' records.

Clinical Experience sessions add hands-on practice. In the spring of Year 1 you attend three online sessions, taking histories from real patients with heart, lung or musculoskeletal problems. In each semester of Year 2 you attend five face-to-face sessions in groups of four or five, in a GP surgery or on a hospital ward. The spring sessions pull together everything you have learned ahead of your Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), a practical exam in which you move round timed stations, each testing a clinical skill.

Year 2 also brings General Practice Experience: five afternoon tutorials in a practice, in groups of about eight. You meet patients and members of the primary care team, and often consult with a patient for the first time.

Knowledge is tested mainly through progress testing. These are computer-based exams of single best answer questions: you read a short clinical scenario and choose the best of several options. You sit them from Year 1 to Year 4, with questions drawn from the national licensing exam's content map, so you can track your progress towards the standard needed at the end. You get individual feedback on your strengths and weaknesses and see how you compare with your year.

Clinical skills are tested in OSCEs. At each timed station an examiner watches you do a task, such as taking a history, examining a patient or explaining a treatment. SSCs are assessed through projects, presentations and written assignments. A portfolio of reflective practice and workplace-based assessments, such as a tutor scoring one of your consultations, covers the rest.

The practical share of your marks grows as you go. In each year's main module, practical assessment counts for 50% in Year 1, rising to 55%, 60% and then 65% in Year 4, with written exams making up the rest.

Every UK medical graduate must now pass the Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA) to join the medical register. Its first part, the Applied Knowledge Test (AKT), is a national written exam set by the Medical Schools Council: two papers of 100 single best answer questions, two hours each, on consecutive days. Queen's students sit it in June after Year 4, and around 40% of its questions are set in primary care. In 2024 the school told the GMC that a second attempt comes about ten months later, in May of Year 5.

The second part, the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA), is a final-year OSCE that the school runs to GMC requirements. When the GMC observed it in March 2026, it ran over three days: two at the Medical Biology Centre and one at hospital sites around Northern Ireland. The GMC found it well organised with a good level of consistency across stations.

When the GMC reviewed the CPSA in 2024, it had 16 stations, some of them rest stops, and each lasted nine and a half minutes, including a minute and a half of reading time. Real patients took part where you had to detect genuine clinical signs, and every station had a professionalism element. To pass, you needed an overall score at or above the pass mark and passes in at least 11 individual stations. Feedback came by station and by skill area, with your year's results for comparison.

Placements cover the whole of Northern Ireland and its five HSC Trusts: Belfast, Northern, South Eastern, Southern and Western. Queen's says its students are welcomed in every hospital in the region and in more than 150 general practices. A quarter of clinical placements are in primary care.

You receive your Trust allocation in Year 2, and it holds for the rest of the course, so you can plan ahead. Whatever your allocation, in Years 3 to 5 you do at least two clinical placements in Belfast and at least two elsewhere in Northern Ireland.

In Year 4 most hospital placements stay within a single Trust, with your GP practice matched to it geographically where possible, so you see how care is co-ordinated between hospital and community.

Travel and accommodation need planning. In Years 1 and 2 you pay your own travel to the weekly clinical sessions, although a limited travel contribution scheme funded by the Department of Health is being set up. Arrangements for free residential accommodation during hospital placements in Years 3 to 5 are under review with the Department of Health for Northern Ireland, and may be replaced by travel contributions or travel zones.

Some Trusts currently charge a refundable deposit for residential accommodation. GP placements in Years 4 and 5 may mean staying in bed and breakfast accommodation, depending on where the practice is. The cost can be reclaimed up to a nightly limit. The school is also developing simulation training at placement sites, so students need not travel back to Queen's for it.

Student Selected Components (SSCs) are modules where you choose the topic, giving you time to go deeper into an area that interests you. There is one in each of Years 1, 2 and 3, and a fourth in final year. Contact hours and teaching methods vary with the subject, and SSCs are assessed through project work, presentations and written assignments.

The Year 3 and final-year SSCs are both built around quality improvement, from a three-week project in Year 3 to the 18-week group project in Year 5. Clinical SSCs can involve travel, but accommodation and subsistence costs for them can be reclaimed.

The Clinical Elective comes at the start of final year, in July and August. The module description sets it as a four-week elective, in a module timetabled over six weeks. You arrange it yourself, and it does not have to be overseas: you can stay in Northern Ireland, go elsewhere in the UK or travel abroad.

Many students travel abroad, often to Australia, India, Canada or countries in Africa, and some book through commercial elective providers. The university estimates costs from about £100 to £5,000 depending on the destination, and competitive travel awards are available within Queen's.

Outside the timetable, the school offers summer studentships in medical education and in its research centres, a way to try research or teaching projects during the holidays.

Intercalating means taking a year out of medicine to study for another degree, usually with a research focus, before returning to the course. At Queen's it is optional. You can work towards a Bachelor of Science (BSc), a Master's degree or a PhD.

The intercalated BSc in Medical Sciences is usually taken after Year 2 or Year 3, and it can also follow Year 4. The year is equivalent to the final year of a human biology degree: a compulsory research project, mostly laboratory-based with some clinical options, plus two modules chosen from four.

The four modules are Cardiovascular Pathobiology and Treatment, Embryology and Developmental Biology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and Applied Physiology in Health and Disease. Modules are assessed by coursework and exams, and the project by a dissertation and an oral presentation. Each new student is put in touch with someone who has just finished the degree, who acts as a mentor.

Intercalated Master's degrees are open after Year 3 or Year 4. They combine 30 weeks of teaching with a 15-week dissertation or research project, which usually runs from June to September.

The school's intercalation page lists the MSc Biomedical and Clinical Research, the Master of Public Health (MPH) and the MSc in Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics. It also lists the MSc (Res) Cancer Medicine, a research-based master's. The course page adds the MPH in Global Health and the MSc in Clinical Anatomy, and the School of Psychology offers the MSc Applied Developmental Psychology and MSc Clinical Health Psychology.

For the BSc you must have passed all assessments in the year you apply from. For a Master's after Year 3, you need first-attempt passes in all Year 3 modules and an overall profile equivalent to a 2.2. After Year 4 you also need first-attempt passes in all Year 4 modules and in the AKT. The school strongly encourages students who pass the AKT first time to intercalate at that point.

Your first two years are centred on the Medical Biology Centre. It has three large lecture theatres, the Biomedical Library with a student computing area, the anatomy and physiology laboratories, and the Clinical Skills Education Centre on its first floor. The Whitla Medical Building next door houses the school office and the Centre for Medical Education, which runs the course.

The Clinical Skills Education Centre is used in every year, from basic life support in Year 1 to high-fidelity simulation in Years 4 and 5. It hosts the undergraduate OSCEs, apart from one day of the final CPSA, which runs at hospital sites. Its equipment includes a full-body cardiopulmonary simulator with pulses, heart sounds, murmurs and breath sounds, used to teach bedside heart and lung examination in Year 3.

The KN Cheung SK Chin InterSim Centre, open since 2021, is the university's interprofessional simulation centre, used across medicine, dentistry, nursing, midwifery and pharmacy.

On the Royal Victoria Hospital site, the Mulhouse building is a base for medical students and clinical academic staff. It has the Medical Library and five large seminar rooms, and two large lecture theatres sit in the neighbouring Institute of Clinical Science.

Each student has a reflective practice tutor throughout the course. The tutor supports the reflective parts of the course, mentors you and points you to the university's help with academic, financial and wellbeing problems. You also have an Advisor of Studies, and each year group has a Student Support Lead.

Peer support is built into teaching. Senior students trained as simulation facilitators teach junior years, including basic life support and first responder training for more than 300 first-year students each year. The GMC's 2024 review of the final clinical exam also noted student-led mock OSCEs for Years 3 and 4, and a 12-week online programme for final-year students taught by Foundation doctors.

According to the same 2024 review, students who fail the final OSCE or score in the bottom 3% are invited to a one-to-one feedback meeting. Those resitting are offered extra tutoring, a mock OSCE and targeted clinical consolidation classes.