The Sheffield Medicine course

Sheffield describes its course as fully integrated. Topics are linked across each year, which the programme specification calls horizontal integration, and themes also run through every year, which it calls vertical integration. Four threads run the whole way through: medical sciences, clinical competencies, Integrated Learning Activities and student-selected components.

The school treats seeing patients as the most important way to learn medicine: taking a history, examining the patient and agreeing a plan of care. On clinical attachments you see patients alone or with a clinical teacher, and follow some of them through a whole episode of illness. You also spend time with other professionals, such as nurses and social services staff.

The current course is split into four phases, which do not line up exactly with academic years, and your role grows phase by phase. In Phase 1 you mostly watch clinical demonstrations and healthcare staff at work. In Phase 2 you learn practical skills in the clinical skills centre and with patients. In Phase 3 you use them on hospital and GP placements. Phase 4 takes you to the level of a Foundation Year 1 (F1) doctor, the first year of paid training after graduation.

The programme is also designed so that you manage more of your own learning as the years go on. The new curriculum plans to add more simulation, where you rehearse clinical scenarios in a safe, supervised setting before doing them for real.

Sheffield teaches anatomy in dedicated labs built around prosection. That means you study parts of the body that trained anatomists have already dissected and carefully exposed, rather than cutting structures out yourself. Teaching comes from clinical anatomists and other anatomy teachers, and the same team also teaches students of dentistry, biomedical science and pharmacy.

The collection includes von Hagens plastinated specimens. Plastination replaces the water and fat in real human tissue with durable polymers, so the body keeps its natural shape, texture and detail. You examine muscles, organs, nerves and blood vessels as they actually sit in the body, which the university says is more accurate than models or digital images.

The lab also holds 22 Anatomage tables. These full-size interactive tables let you move through a digital body layer by layer, rotate it, isolate single structures and simulate clinical conditions. That helps you link a structure to the problems you might meet as a doctor.

The programme specification still lists dissection among practical sessions. However, in its 2024 to 2025 review with the GMC, the school described moving away from cadaveric dissection, where students dissect a donated body, towards prosection and digital resources. The university says anatomy teaching continues in the new curriculum.

Your first patient contact is in general practice. In year 1 you spend 10 half-days in a GP surgery as part of a small group, starting in week two, and the school describes these as fortnightly sessions. GP visits continue into year 2, and the new curriculum plans regular GP placements through the clinical years as well.

Also in year 1, the Multi-Professional Experience is a two-week block in which you work alongside medical and nursing teams, with a focus on building clinical skills. The Community Attachment Scheme puts patient-centred care at the heart of the course from the start. Through it, volunteer patients can host you at home for a history-taking session.

Phase 1 is mostly about watching and basic skills: clinical demonstrations, observing staff at work, first steps in history-taking and examination, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). On the current course you learn most practical skills in simulation, and are assessed on most of them by the end of year 2, before your first long hospital placement.

On the current course, that placement comes in year 3. It opens Phase 2b and is the first Longitudinal Integrated Clinical Placement, called LICP1, a 12-week block in hospital. Longitudinal means one hospital team is your hub for the whole block. You go out from it to other departments for specific learning, and since a recent change you also rotate through two wards.

As part of that team you attend ward rounds, operations, pathology meetings and outpatient clinics. If you start in 2027, though, year 3 is the first year of the new curriculum, so you will not do Phase 2b or LICP1 in their current form. The shape of your first long placement is part of the plans still going through university approval. The later placements are described year by year below.

There are two kinds of assessment. Formative assessments are practice: they do not count, but they show you where you stand. Summative assessments count, and you must pass them to move on to the next phase and, at the end, to graduate. Material from earlier phases comes back in later exams, so topics are tested again as you go.

Some summative tests are mastery assessments, which check you can carry out essential clinical skills. Practical procedures are observed first in simulation and then in practice, under direct and then indirect supervision, and logged in an e-portfolio that the clinical skills team signs off. Professional behaviour is judged by the clinicians who supervise you on placement, and their reports go into a progress file in your portfolio.

To qualify you must pass the MLA. The GMC requires it in every UK medical degree from 2024 to 2025 onwards. It has two parts: the Applied Knowledge Test (AKT), a written test of medical knowledge, and the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA), a practical exam. Sheffield runs both as part of its finals. You must pass all your in-course assessments, and on the current course finish your skills logbook by December of year 5, before you can sit finals.

The AKT is the national version, created centrally by the Medical Schools Council, the body that represents UK medical schools. It has two computer-based papers of 100 single best answer questions each, two hours per paper, on consecutive days. A single best answer question asks you to choose the best of several plausible options. The pass mark is set at the level of a new F1 doctor in their first week.

The CPSA, as the GMC approved it in June 2024, is a sequential OSCE. An Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is a circuit of timed stations, each testing a clinical task in front of an examiner. Everyone sits 12 screening stations. If your score is not clearly above the pass mark, you sit 12 more confirmation stations some weeks later. Each station gives one minute of reading, an eight-minute task and two minutes of questions.

At the time of the 2024 GMC reviews, finals also included a short-answer paper on topics of local importance, and you had to pass the Prescribing Safety Assessment, an online test of safe prescribing. Assessment is set to change. At an October 2025 assessment event observed by the GMC, the school sought views on a planned move to Programmatic Assessment for Learning. That approach bases decisions on many smaller assessments gathered over time. The new curriculum is also reviewing when finals fall.

• Written formats: single best answer questions, structured short answer questions, project reports, poster presentations and logbooks.
• Clinical formats: OSCEs, observed long cases (you assess a patient in full while an examiner watches), mini clinical examinations, reports from your clinical attachments and oral presentations.
• In the finals OSCE, the patient in each station awards 3 of the 25 marks for your bedside manner, and since 2023 you must pass at least 8 of the 12 screening stations.
• At the time of the 2024 GMC review, the school did not run an official mock finals OSCE. The student Medical Society ran one for every candidate, and placement providers were encouraged to run their own. For the written papers, year 5 now opens with two practice exams in the national format.
• If you do not pass the finals OSCE, you meet the lead for that phase on results day and get a performance review and advice before the resit.

Clinical placements take place in hospitals and GP practices across South Yorkshire, North Derbyshire and the surrounding areas. Over the course you work in general practice and community care, and in two kinds of hospital. District general hospitals serve a local town and its surroundings, while large teaching hospitals also train doctors and run specialist services.

Named placement hospitals include the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield, Doncaster Royal Infirmary, Rotherham Hospital and Chesterfield Royal Hospital. Their details are listed below. Placements in Doncaster, Rotherham and Chesterfield mean regular travel out of Sheffield.

In its 2025 self-assessment to the GMC, the school said it had changed travel payments in response to student feedback. It also told the GMC that a pilot bus between the medical school and the hospital in Doncaster was due to begin in summer 2026.

The social accountability placement works differently. The school introduced these placements in 2015, and every student now spends four weeks with a charity or community organisation as part of their SSC time. With the host, you agree a piece of project work that helps its activities or the people it serves.

Partners are spread across Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster, Barnsley, Chesterfield, Bassetlaw and Derbyshire. The aim is to show you how poverty, isolation and other circumstances shape health, and to get you working with people from very different backgrounds. A 2024 university film features one partner, Sheffield Mencap and Gateway, which supports people with learning disabilities and autism and their families.

Eighty per cent of the curriculum is core and everyone takes it. The other 20% is made up of SSCs, which must relate to medicine and are aimed at generic skills, research skills and employability.

In the early years, SSCs build your critical thinking and research skills step by step and lead up to a research project of your own. Later SSCs let you study an area in more depth or try a clinical field you might want to work in. The course page lists community-based options, electives and medical audit among them. An audit checks how care on a ward or in a clinic measures up against an agreed standard.

An elective is a placement you choose and help to arrange, often somewhere quite different from your usual placements. The programme specification says many Sheffield students spend up to 15 weeks of their SSC time abroad.

Intercalation means taking a year out of medicine to study for an extra degree, then returning to the course. At Sheffield it is optional. On the current course you can apply for an intercalated honours BSc once you have passed Phase 2, which ends partway through year 3. The masters options open after at least three years of medicine. These entry points belong to the current course, and the new curriculum is still going through approval.

You register your intention with the school by a deadline, which was 31 March for 2026 to 2027. You also meet an Associate Director of Student Affairs to arrange a leave of absence for the year. The school asks early because it needs to fit returning students back into clinical placements.

Sheffield's own option is the BSc Medical Sciences Research. It has three compulsory modules: Ethical Research Practice; Research Skills, which covers statistics including multiple linear regression and survival analysis; and a six-month original research project, assessed by a dissertation and an oral presentation. You add one optional module to match your project. Understanding Medical Research Practice includes time in the Clinical Research Facility. Understanding Surgical and Anaesthetic Practice, for surgery or anaesthetics projects, adds theatre skills and surgical attachments.

Projects span oncology, cardiovascular sciences, infection, immunity, neuroscience, child health, endocrinology, reproductive medicine and surgery. They are grouped as clinical or surgical, laboratory, medical humanities or qualitative. Applications run in two rounds, supervisors interview applicants, and the school matches students to projects using both sides' preferences. You can also design your own project if you find a willing supervisor.

Alternatively you can intercalate into a one-year masters. Current options include Public Health, Clinical Neurology, Translational Neuroscience, Cancer Biology and Therapeutics, Health Economics and Decision Modelling, Human and Molecular Genetics, Science Communication, and Cognitive Science and Philosophy of AI.

Separately, if you have to leave medicine after completing the first three years of the course, you can receive a BMedSci Clinical Sciences exit degree.

The Medical School building is connected to the Royal Hallamshire Hospital and is close to Sheffield Children's Hospital, the Students' Union and the rest of the university campus. In 2025 the school opened a new student space in the building, with a large common room, smaller study rooms and a kitchen.

Most teaching in years 1 and 2 happens in the Medical School and the Medical Teaching Unit, where anatomy is taught, with some sessions in other campus buildings. When the school wrote its 2025 self-assessment, the clinical skills centre was being refurbished, so rooms elsewhere on campus were being used in the meantime.

Clinical skills are taught in simulated settings equipped with high-fidelity manikins, which can mimic signs such as breathing and heart sounds, and virtual reality equipment. The school says the kit reflects what is used in the workplace, and the same facilities serve its postgraduate and apprenticeship programmes. Most Patients as Educators sessions take place in the George Porter building on campus.

The Health Sciences Library is the specialist library for the Faculty of Health. It covers subjects from anatomy, physiology and pharmacology to surgery, psychiatry, paediatrics, obstetrics and the history of medicine. The university's five library sites hold more than 1.3 million books and journals between them, and the online library is available 24 hours a day.

You have a personal academic tutor through the school's Personal and Academic Tutor Scheme, and you keep the same tutor for the whole course. You meet at least twice a year, and each meeting has set questions to help you through the big changes, such as moving from campus to hospital placements.

The MBChB also has its own Student Affairs and Support team, made up of three academic leads, ten more academic staff and four administrative staff. You can go to them, or to the team running your phase, for help, and they can refer you on to occupational health or university support services. Associate Directors of Student Affairs are the senior staff you meet about decisions such as taking a leave of absence.

On placement, support also comes from the hospital. At Chesterfield Royal Hospital, for example, every student has a named supervisor from the trust plus pastoral support from its undergraduate team. The team's office in the Education Centre is staffed from 8am to 4pm on weekdays, and students there get an out-of-hours number for emergencies.

The university's Disability and Dyslexia Support Service contacts every offer holder with a learning support questionnaire, so any support you need can be planned before you start.

The GMC's 2024 to 2025 review also records a Race Equality Group with a student chair and a staff chair, and an event celebrating the achievements of Black, Asian and minority ethnic students. The school has also written a staff guide to what it calls decolonising the curriculum.