The St George's Medicine course

Teaching changes shape as you move through the course. In years 1 and 2 most learning happens on campus, and each week pulls several subjects together around one clinical case, as explained under case-based learning below. In the heart and lungs module, for example, you learn the normal physiology, how disease damages it, how to take a history and examine the chest, and what the illness means for families.

Three curriculum themes run through both early years. Basic and clinical sciences covers how the body is built and works, and what disease, injury and ageing do to it. Professional skills covers communication, examination and practical procedures. Patients, populations and society covers how behaviour, culture, money, ethics and law shape health and care. Teaching mixes face-to-face sessions, live online teaching and material you work through in your own time.

Year 3 moves you from campus to the workplace. Lecture-based teaching gives way to problem-based learning units that alternate with clinical placements, and graduate-entry students join your year. In years 4 and 5 formal teaching is limited. You learn mainly by working in clinical teams, through bedside teaching and self-directed work with patients.

Learning in the clinical years is organised around 15 clinical practice outcomes, the tasks a new doctor must be able to do. They run from taking a history and examining a patient to recognising an emergency, planning treatment, working in a team and improving patient safety. Prescribing is one of them, though every prescription you write as a student is simulated.

In years 1 and 2 a normal week follows the case of the week. It opens with a case-based learning tutorial where your group meets the scenario and closes with another where you pull together what you have found. In between come lectures and online material linked to the case, a practical anatomy session, and small-group clinical skills and communication skills sessions.

The timetable also includes independent-learning time and, at points, exam-question practice sessions. Regular GP visits, where you interview patients the GP has recruited for teaching, run through the two years. The weekly pattern pauses for the hospital attachments, when you spend two weeks on the wards instead of on campus.

The rhythm changes in year 3. During clinical blocks you spend your days with your assigned team and come back for clinical and communication skills teaching on Wednesday mornings. During PBL units, a weekly half-day of lectures and tutorials on investigating disease and clinical pharmacology, the science of how drugs work and are prescribed, runs alongside the PBL cases.

Anatomy is taught mainly in the purpose-built Anatomy Suite on the Tooting campus. You learn from prosections, which are real human specimens dissected in advance by experts to show particular structures. Alongside them are plastinated specimens (tissue preserved with plastic so it can be handled), potted specimens kept in preserving fluid, real bones, X-ray and other radiographic images, and anatomical models.

Digital tools sit next to the specimens. Anatomage tables are interactive digital tables that let you explore the body in 3D, and Complete Anatomy is 3D anatomy software. Teaching staff have also filmed dissection videos overlaid with X-rays and 3D graphics, and there are virtual anatomy lessons. A library of plastic models is available for your own study periods.

Anatomy is part of an integrated, spiral curriculum: you return to each area more than once, in more depth each time. In years 1 and 2 it is taught weekly alongside the case of the week. Practical classes are led by academic staff with demonstrators, who include graduates of master's courses in anatomy education, senior City St George's students and core surgical trainees (junior surgeons in training).

You start learning clinical skills in your first weeks, and the clinical skills team follows practical sessions with visits where you use those skills with real patients. Community visits and diversity sessions let you hear patients describe their own experience of illness and learn how their social and cultural background shapes their care.

Regular GP visits run through years 1 and 2. The GP recruits patients with long-term conditions, often people living with several at once, especially for your visits. You interview them to build your communication skills, get structured feedback from the GP tutor, then join a tutorial to consolidate what you learned. In year 2 you also follow one patient's contacts with the health service across the attachment and reflect on what they went through.

Hospital time in the early years comes in blocks called early years clinical experience (EYCE). Over years 1 and 2 you do three two-week hospital attachments, currently covering medicine, surgery, senior health (care of older people) and radiology. A preparation week comes first. On the attachments you follow patients through their care, spend time with different members of the clinical team and write reflections on what you see.

St George's assesses you in three domains, and you must pass each one separately to move up a year. Professional knowledge is tested by the year specific knowledge test (YSKT) in years 1 to 4. Professional skills are tested by the clinical competency assessment (CCA) in years 2, 3 and 4. The third domain, becoming a doctor, tracks your professionalism across the whole course.

The CCA is the school's version of an OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination). You move round a circuit of stations, each a timed task such as taking a history, examining a patient or carrying out a procedure, and an examiner marks you against a set scheme. Each CCA covers what you have been taught up to that year.

Becoming a doctor is assessed through attendance, conduct, projects, a personal and professional development portfolio and workplace-based assessments on placement. These include the mini-CEX, where a senior clinician watches you with a real patient and gives feedback, and DOPS, direct observation of a procedure. In case-based discussion you talk a clinician through a patient you have looked after. These assessments carry more weight as the course goes on.

In the final year you sit the UKMLA, which the General Medical Council (GMC) has required of all UK medical graduates since 2024-25. It has two parts. The Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) is a national exam produced centrally by the Medical Schools Council. The GMC approved St George's use of it in June 2024. Its decision describes two computer-based papers of 100 single best answer questions, each two hours long, set at the level of a new F1 doctor.

The second part, the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA), is run by the school in the same format as its earlier CCAs. The GMC's March 2024 decision says the school had run ten stations of 10 to 15 minutes over two days since the pandemic, down from 15 over three days before it. The school planned to move to 12 stations from 2023-24, and the GMC recommended a return to 15 as soon as possible. Every station also marked rapport and professionalism, and where simulated patients (trained actors) were used, they typically gave 5 to 10 per cent of the station's marks.

You must pass the becoming a doctor domain before you can sit the final knowledge and skills exams. You also need to pass the Prescribing Safety Assessment (PSA), a national exam on prescribing medicines safely, before you graduate.

Your home hospital is St George's University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which shares the Tooting site. Most clinical placements are at St George's or at local and regional NHS trusts, plus GP practices in the same areas. The 2026/27 curriculum brochure maps 17 NHS trusts, from Kingston and Croydon out to Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and Somerset. GP placements are not shown on the map.

How far you travel depends on the rotation. Paediatrics opens with three days at St George's, emergency medicine usually splits two weeks at St George's and two at a local district general hospital, and anaesthetics begins with a week of courses there. Other blocks, including the final-year medicine and surgery assistantships, are based locally and across the south of England.

GP placements give you one-to-one supervision from a GP tutor, with continuity through the placement. In the final-year GP assistantship you are based in one spoke practice, where you see, assess and manage patients of all ages and run supervised surgeries (clinic sessions) of your own. Hub tutors, who lead the small-group side of the hub-and-spoke model, run weekly tutorials alongside, including a practice clinical assessment before finals.

A placements team allocates clinical placements, and clinical-year students who meet set criteria can apply separately to be given local ones. An MBBS team processes travel claims, under either the university's own scheme or the NHS Travel and Dual Accommodation Expenses scheme. The NHS scheme can help with travel and a second home near a placement. It is only open to students eligible for the income-assessed NHS bursary, which on this course starts in the fifth year of study.

Student selected components (SSCs) are the parts of the course where you choose the topic, and they count towards the becoming a doctor domain. In year 1 the foundation SSC takes a topic from outside the core curriculum, and in year 2 SSC 1 lets you study one topic in depth.

In the T year, alongside the case analysis project, you do a three-week SSC chosen either from audit, data-set analysis and service evaluation, or from discussion-based, arts and humanities projects. An audit checks whether care in a hospital or practice meets an agreed standard.

The final year has two five-week SSCs. SSCF1 is an approved clinical or non-clinical placement of your choice, meant to help you explore career interests and build confidence before F1. The clinical skills team also offers an SSC in medical education for final-year students interested in teaching.

SSCF2 is your elective. It runs from late April to June, after final assessments, and can be in any area relevant to your future career. You are encouraged to go somewhere different from your core placements and to study in more depth. You may use it to see a healthcare system in another country, subject to any travel restrictions at the time.

Intercalating means taking an extra year out of the medical course to study for a separate degree, often with a research focus. At St George's it is optional and not needed to graduate, and it makes the course six years long. You can take an intercalated BSc (iBSc) at City St George's or at a selection of other universities.

You can take an iBSc once you have passed years 1 and 2, so it becomes your third year of study, or later, as your fourth. Instead of a bachelor's degree, you can apply competitively after year 3 for an intercalated master's (iMSc), again at City St George's or elsewhere. Either way, the aim is to build your scientific knowledge, critical thinking and research skills.

The in-house Medical Sciences iBSc is a one-year Honours degree in one of five subjects: anatomy; infection and immunity; medical ethics and law; physiology and pharmacology; or psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience. You take 75 credits of taught modules and do a 45-credit research project. The project can be lab work, data analysis, a clinical audit or a systematic review, which pulls together all the published research on one question. You study alongside final-year Biomedical Science students rather than in a separate group.

The university also lists a Clinical Pharmacology iBSc. For a master's after year 3, its in-house options are the Biomedical Science MRes (Master of Research), the Genomic Medicine MSc, the Sports Cardiology MSc and the Medical Ethics, Law and Humanities MA.

Clinical skills teaching and exams use simulated hospital wards on Level 4 of the Hunter Wing, refurbished and reopened in December 2023. They have hospital beds, cubicle curtains, a medical wall, personal protective equipment dispensers, examination lamps and a scrub trough. The university describes two 10-bed simulated hospital settings. These rooms are booked for timetabled teaching and exams, not open practice.

For practice in your own time there is the Clinical Skills Practice Room on Level 5 of the Hunter Wing, open 9am to 10pm on weekdays and 9am to 4.30pm at weekends. It holds resuscitation, blood pressure and ECG equipment, neurological kits, pelvic, rectal and breast examination models, antenatal manikins, ear and eye examination sets and catheterisation equipment. At present you can walk in without booking.

Seven older teaching spaces have been rebuilt into two flexible clinical skills teaching rooms. Early practical classes also use the pathology labs, and anatomy is taught in the Anatomy Suite described above.

Online, staff have written open online courses (MOOCs) on topics such as genomics and organ donation. You can also use Speaking Clinically, a large library of videos in which patients talk about their conditions.

Every MBBS student has a personal tutor, and some of your assessment submissions are linked to your personal tutor meetings. Staff across the Centre for Clinical Education, which has over 100 academic staff, take part in personal tutoring. Each stage of the course has its own contact point for course and assessment queries, and a separate MBBS student support team handles complex situations, such as needing to interrupt your studies.

Every assessment format is tried out as practice before one that counts. The clinical skills team also runs a Peer Tutor Programme as part of developing students as future teachers.

The GMC's 2024 reviews described the support around finals. Students could sit a practice AKT on the real exam platform, open for two weeks, with answers released afterwards. After the final OSCE, each student received a report for every station, showing their score against the year group and the examiners' comments. Anyone who failed a final exam met one-to-one with a senior academic to plan a resit or repeat year.