The Sunderland Medicine course

Clinical problems introduced in Year 1 come back in later years, each time in more depth, so your understanding builds in layers. Phase 1 (Years 1 and 2) covers the basics of biomedical, behavioural and social science. It also covers research and study skills, communication, basic clinical skills and professionalism.

The balance shifts as you go. Phase 1 is mostly campus-based, with short visits to general practice. In Phase 2 (Years 3 and 4) you go through the science a second time, now focusing on disease (pathology) and more complex cases, while learning core clinical skills on placement. Phase 3 (Year 5) is called Preparation for Professional Practice and consists of extended student assistantships.

You also learn alongside students from other health courses, including nursing, midwifery, pharmacy, physiotherapy, paramedic science, psychology and social work. These interprofessional sessions show you what each profession does and how to work as a team. The course page also says you can study complementary subjects from elsewhere in the university, including the humanities. In 2024 the school said it was building teaching on sustainability into the curriculum, because of the effect climate change is having on health.

The school's admissions policy for 2027/28 entry says the course deliberately gives extra weight to general practice and to psychiatry, the branch of medicine that treats mental illness. The aim is to train the kinds of doctors the NHS needs. The policy also says the school was set up to produce more GPs and hospital doctors for the North East, where too many trainee doctors move away. You can see this in the GP placements in every year and the two mental health trusts among the partners.

In Year 1 much of your week follows the current PBL case. When the school described its anatomy teaching in 2022, first-year students had about two hours of taught anatomy a week, covering the body systems in that week's case, plus work to do outside class.

The school's GP tutor guidance for 2025/26 set out the placement pattern described here. Placement time is counted in sessions of half a day. In Year 1 you spend six Wednesday mornings (or three full Wednesdays) in a GP surgery, between the third week of January and the end of March. In Year 2 you go on Wednesdays again, for eight half days or four full days between October and March.

During your four-week GP block in Year 3, you and a partner spend seven sessions a week at the practice from Monday to Thursday, with Wednesday afternoon free. On Friday you are back on campus for teaching from the clinical teaching team. In Year 4 the GP week runs Tuesday to Friday, with a tutorial on Monday. In the Year 5 GP block you do eight sessions from Monday to Thursday and have a tutorial on Friday.

Anatomy is taught in the Anatomy Lab, part of the Anatomy Centre that opened at City Campus in early 2022. The school calls its approach blended. It covers gross anatomy, the structures you can see with the naked eye, and living anatomy, how you find and examine those structures on a living person.

Much of the detail here comes from the school's October 2022 article on its anatomy teaching; its current medicine pages describe the same blended approach. You learn from prosections, real human specimens that experts have dissected in advance to show particular structures. The school says this helps with depth perception and shows how much bodies vary. It may also be your first experience of death, so you are taught how to respect patients after death as well as in life.

When the Anatomy Centre opened in 2022, the university said it would give medical students teaching with donated human bodies. In February 2022 the Human Tissue Authority (HTA), the regulator that licenses places using donated bodies for teaching, inspected the centre. Its inspection covered the body store, embalming suite and dissection room, and it found the centre suitable for a licence.

Virtual dissection is a large part of the teaching. The Anatomage Table is a touch-screen table showing a whole digital body that you can take apart layer by layer, with imaging alongside. You can colour-code blood vessels or nerves and make surrounding organs see-through. Touch-screen computers run Virtual Human Dissector, and Complete Anatomy software is available on your own devices in Years 1 and 2.

You also handle anatomical models of every body system in most lessons, and use body painting. That means drawing organs and bony landmarks on a classmate's skin, in pairs or small groups you choose, to learn where things lie. Clinical imaging, including portable ultrasound, comes up regularly. Sonographers, staff trained to carry out ultrasound scans, work with the anatomy team to teach you to scan volunteer patients and read the images.

As well as the anatomy team, you are taught by clinicians from the local hospital trusts, including surgeons, sonographers and radiologists, the doctors who specialise in reading scans and X-rays.

Before you meet patients, you train on campus in core communication skills. Each student does regular role play with made-up cases to practise gathering information, and you also have mental health awareness training. Supervised practice with simulated patients continues throughout the course.

Some of the people you practise on belong to the university's Patient, Carer and Public Involvement (PCPI) programme. Running since 2014, it trains and pays about 250 members of the public, many of whom share their own medical conditions as case studies. They act as patients while students practise heart, chest and abdominal examinations, then tell the students how well they communicated. The GMC's 2024 report on the final exam says its simulated patients are recruited from this programme.

Your first real patients come in general practice, from the third week of January in Year 1. You go in a group of up to three and take turns leading consultations with people who have booked a GP appointment and agreed to see a student first. Depending on the practice, the GP tutor watches you or lets you consult alone. The tutor always finishes the consultation so the patient is managed safely, then talks it through with you.

In Year 2 you go to a different practice, and on campus you learn to examine each body system. From Year 3 you run parallel surgeries: your own list of patients alongside the GP's clinic, with the GP still responsible for their care. Up to one session a week can be with another member of the practice team, such as a nurse practitioner or clinical pharmacist. In Years 3 to 5 you can also join team meetings and clinics such as contraception or minor surgery.

You can also spend up to one session a week in a less usual primary care setting, such as a nursing home or urgent care centre. Hospital placements begin in Phase 2, based in local teaching hospitals. By Year 5 you are expected to look after your own patients under supervision.

Assessment is grouped into three areas. Professional knowledge is tested by written exams. Professional skills are tested by OSCEs and written assignments. Professional behaviours are judged by reviewing your portfolio, a record of your experience and reflection. You must pass each year's assessments before moving on.

Written exams use several question types. Single best answer questions ask you to pick the best of several options. Extended matching questions ask you to match cases to a longer list of answers. Short answer questions need a brief written response. You also complete written information management skills assessments and reflective assignments.

Other assessed parts of the course include workplace-based assessments and multi-source feedback, meaning comments on your work from a range of staff. You also complete student-selected components (SSCs), pieces of work where you choose the topic.

OSCEs run in every year. In Years 1 and 2 they are held on campus; from Year 3 they take place at the partner NHS organisations. Stations vary by year but can include history taking, examining a patient, prescribing and practical procedures. In 2026/27, summative OSCEs for Years 1 to 4 fall between late May and the end of June, with resits in late July or early August.

The MLA has two parts. The AKT is a national written exam organised through the Medical Schools Council. The GMC's May 2024 decision on Sunderland describes it as two computer-based papers of 100 single best answer questions, sat on consecutive days. The pass standard is that of a doctor in their first week of Foundation Year 1.

The CPSA is the final-year OSCE. As approved by the GMC in March 2024, it has 14 stations over two days, each nine and a half minutes plus a minute's reading time. It runs at the clinical education centres of three partner hospital trusts and includes stations on ethical dilemmas that new doctors face. To pass, you need the overall pass mark and must pass at least 11 of the 14 stations.

Your placements are with NHS organisations in the North East. The school works with three acute trusts, which run general hospitals with emergency departments, and two mental health trusts. It also works with community services and 63 GP practices. Five Directors of Undergraduate Clinical Studies, consultants working in the partner trusts, oversee teaching and placements for medical students.

In Years 1 and 2 you are mostly on campus, and your placement time is in general practice. Years 3 to 5 are based in local teaching hospitals and GP practices. Practices anywhere in the region can host Sunderland students. If one practice cannot offer enough sessions, the school can split a placement between nearby practices or across a primary care network, a local group of GP surgeries.

Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has described what the first hospital placements looked like. In 2021 it took nine of the 48 students in the school's first year group when they reached Year 3. They spent four days a week in the trust until the end of March, rotating through general medicine, elderly care, paediatrics, surgery and mental health. Each had a buddy, one of the trust's first-year junior doctors, to help them settle into the workplace.

The school's 2025/26 GP tutor guidance said students in Phases 2 and 3 could claim back GP placement travel, and overnight accommodation if needed. Phase 1 students were not directly reimbursed. Practices more than an hour away by public transport were asked to offer full days rather than half days. The guidance also said students have at least two weeks off over both Christmas and Easter.

The elective is a placement near the end of the course, in the UK or abroad. In 2025, for example, one student split hers between Scotland and Vietnam. The GMC's 2024 report on Sunderland's final exam describes it as eight weeks long, coming after the Year 5 assistantship.

In 2026 the Rothley Trust, a North East charity, gave elective awards to more than a dozen Sunderland students. Their destinations included Nepal, Japan, Poland, Oman, Sri Lanka and the USA. One student spent a month in a hospital emergency department in Sri Lanka, then a month at a sports medicine clinic in Malaysia. The students also raised money themselves to add to the awards.

Your SSCs, described under assessment above, are the other part of the course where you choose the topic.

Intercalating means taking a year out of medicine to study for another degree, then returning to the course. It is optional at Sunderland. The course page lists two routes: a BSc after Year 2, or an MSc after Year 4. You can study at Sunderland or at another university if the School of Medicine approves it.

The school's Clinical Academic Training Office (CATO), based in the Murray Health building, supports students who intercalate. It says intercalation most often happens after Year 4, and that going after Year 3 may be possible case by case. Examples it gives include an MRes (a research master's), an MA or an MMEd (a master's in medical education). You apply through an expression of interest form, and the year usually starts in August and lasts 12 months.

The university's funding guidance says to check that the other course's term dates do not overlap with your medicine years. A clash causes problems with student finance and with registering back onto the MBChB. CATO can advise on extra funding for the intercalated year.

If you want research experience without an extra year, CATO offers funded National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) vacation studentships. These are six-week summer projects in July and August with a supervisor you find. It also runs a summer research internship programme where students work alongside clinical academics.

The School of Medicine is based in the Murray Health building, which it moved into in 2024 after an £8 million renovation. The building has a lecture theatre, seminar rooms and an IT suite. It also has a 120-seat Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) space for interactive group teaching, a silent study zone, breakout spaces and an exam suite.

Computer-based exams, including the AKT, are sat in two online assessment suites with wired computers at individual desks. One of them is in the new medical school building and has been in use since 2023/24.

You use the Anatomy Lab from the start of the course. For clinical skills there is the Living Lab, with mock hospital wards, an immersive suite and simulation manikins, which are models of patients used to practise clinical scenarios. The university's photos show student doctors and nurses training together on a mock ward. Another shows a PBL simulation in the immersive suite with a volunteer from the Patient, Carer and Public Involvement (PCPI) programme.

You get regular feedback and one-to-one sessions with a tutor, to help you improve and to deal with any difficulties early.

After each assessment you receive your overall score and whether you passed, and for OSCEs a station-by-station breakdown. If you fail the AKT or the CPSA, you meet a member of the clinical or academic team trained in giving feedback, who goes through your performance with you. Before a resit of the final-year CPSA, you get full access to the OSCE suites and equipment to prepare. The school encourages every student to write a personal development plan after each major exam that counts.

If you have a disability or health condition, the school's Reasonable Adjustment Policy lets you agree a support plan covering both teaching and exams. The school also uses an occupational health service that advises on adjustments you may need on clinical placements.