The Surrey (GEM) Medicine course

Surrey uses a mix of lectures, small-group work, role play and simulation, laboratory practicals and placements. Each year is organised into strands that are taught and assessed side by side. Medical knowledge covers the biomedical, psychological, social and population health sciences. Clinical practice covers history taking, examination, practical procedures and diagnosis. Professional development and student-selected study run alongside both.

In Year 1 most teaching happens on campus. The module catalogue lists 301 hours of lectures, 128 hours of laboratory work and 196 hours of practical sessions, plus 794 hours of independent study. Subject specialists give the lectures, and team-based learning is used to apply that knowledge to clinical cases. Short practice tests run through the year so you get regular feedback before the exams that count.

From Year 2 the balance flips. You learn mainly on placement, from patients and the NHS staff who care for them, and spend one day a week on campus for seminars, workshops, clinical skills and professional development tutorials. Learning cases on each rotation are matched to the Medical Licensing Assessment (MLA), the national exam every UK medical student must pass before joining the medical register.

In Year 4 you learn mainly as an apprentice within clinical teams. Formal teaching drops to half a day a week of small-group and clinical skills sessions, with some larger interactive sessions on prescribing and radiology.

In June 2026 Surrey published one first-year student's account of a typical week. It gives a good feel for how Year 1 is organised, though your own timetable may differ. Teaching can run from 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, and because the course is practical there may be sessions on Wednesday afternoons.

From Year 2 the shape of the week changes: most days are spent on placement, with one day a week back on campus for teaching. The placements section below describes how one partner trust organises this.

• Monday: a biosciences day of four to eight lectures at the Kate Granger Building, covering topics from cell biology to pharmacology, plus case discussions.
• Tuesday: no fixed lectures. The day is used for GP or mental health placements, special study unit work and independent study.
• Wednesday: anatomy at CASE in the Leggett Building, next to the Manor Park student village, with anatomy and radiology lectures, case-based discussions and dissection room teaching.
• Thursday: clinical and communication skills at the Surrey Clinical Simulation Centre, rotating between communication workshops, examination training, procedural skills and OSCE practice, often in pairs or small groups.
• Friday: 9am to 5pm, with short practice tests on the week's work, team-based learning, structured revision and a meeting with your professional development group and mentor.

Anatomy is taught at CASE, in the Leggett Building. Its anatomy suite is licensed under the Human Tissue Act 2004 and regulated by the Human Tissue Authority. It holds a dissection room, cadaver storage and preparation areas, and embalming facilities. Display screens and an overhead camera let a whole group see fine detail at once. The bodies come from members of the public who donate them for education and research.

In Year 1 everyone learns clinically relevant anatomy from prosections, working with human bones, plastic models, medical imaging, histopathology and 3D anatomy software alongside them. A proportion of interested students can go further and carry out a full-body dissection as a special study unit.

Anatomy is also linked to living patients. From Year 1 you learn surface anatomy with GE Vscan Air handheld ultrasound scanners, first learning how the scanners work and then using them on different parts of the body. Live streams of patient surgery show anatomy in real operations.

Through a partnership with Virtual Reality in Medicine and Surgery (VRiMS), first-year students use virtual reality headsets with 3D anatomy software that show different surgical techniques. Surrey also plans to use surgery filmed at CASE for virtual reality teaching in the later years, alongside surgical placements.

Two practice anatomy spot tests, where you identify structures on specimens, check your progress: one halfway through Year 1 and one at the end. Attending them is compulsory, but they are for feedback rather than marks.

You meet patients in Year 1. The clinical practice strand includes eight placement days, four in general practice and four in community mental health, adding up to 64 hours. You take histories and examine real patients under direct supervision. You must complete four placement assessments, two in each setting, which are for feedback rather than marks.

Alongside those days you practise on manikins and simulated patients in the Clinical Simulation Centre. Year 1 also includes in-person basic life support and paediatric life support training, so you have these skills before you need them on placement.

Patient contact rises steeply from Year 2. On each rotation you meet patients at home, in general practice, in acute hospitals and in community services, and work with the full range of NHS staff. You are assessed with real patients, and experienced doctors, nurses and midwives give you feedback on your professionalism. By Year 4 you are part of a clinical team for six weeks at a time.

Each year is a single module that you pass or fail as a whole, and you must pass it in full before moving on. Every assessment unit in it is listed as pass or fail, but you still receive grades along the way. Individual knowledge tests in Years 1 to 3 are graded unsatisfactory, borderline, satisfactory or excellent. In Year 4 they are marked only satisfactory or unsatisfactory, but OSCE scores are ranked and the top 10% of the year group are graded excellent.

In Year 1 you sit a medical knowledge exam and an OSCE, in which you take a history from a real or simulated patient, examine them, or both. You also complete a portfolio of practical skills, give your special study unit presentation and build up 17 professional judgements, which are records of your professional behaviour made by tutors. Practice versions come first, halfway through the year: a four-station OSCE and a 50-question single best answer paper, where each question offers several plausible options and you pick the best one.

In Years 2 and 3 you sit an Applied Medical Knowledge exam and an end-of-year OSCE. A 30-question practice paper follows each pathway. In Year 2 you also get a practice OSCE station after each pathway, with spoken feedback straight away. In Year 3 a six-station practice OSCE is laid out like the real one.

Placement assessments in Years 2 and 3 include 10 Mini-CEXs and 17 case-based discussions (CBDs) each year. In a Mini-CEX (mini clinical evaluation exercise) an assessor watches you with a real patient. In a CBD you talk a clinician through a patient you have seen. You also complete prescribing DOPS (direct observation of procedural skills), in which you are watched carrying out a prescribing task, and 20 professional judgements a year.

In Year 4 Surrey's Applied Medical Knowledge assessment is listed as two three-hour tests of 125 multiple-choice questions. A satisfactory result in the first two means you have passed; otherwise you get two further tests to reach the standard. While Surrey builds up its own data, the pass mark is set using historic results from Exeter. Final-year OSCEs have four 20-minute stations. You sit two, with a third for anyone who needs it, and must pass at least eight stations across the year.

You must also pass the MLA. Every student graduating from a UK medical school from 2024-25 onwards needs it as part of their degree before joining the medical register. It has two parts. The Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) is an on-screen multiple-choice exam run by medical schools. The Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA) is a practical exam of clinical and professional skills that each school sets and runs. The GMC sets requirements that both parts must meet.

• Year 3 also includes clinical competency assessments and an assessment of your clinical log, which is your record of the patients you have seen and the skills you have practised. Both are pass or fail.
• Year 4 workplace assessments: 8 Mini-CEXs of about 30 minutes, 8 CBDs of about two hours, 24 DOPS on real patients and 3 clinical competency assessments away from real patients.
• A 20-minute discussion of your clinical log with your educational supervisor.
• 25 professional judgements and two 500-word reflective essays on your professional portfolio. There is also a 360-degree professional review, in which five different assessors give feedback on the professional behaviour they have seen in your teaching sessions.
• The Immediate Life Support certificate, which Surrey says must be passed before the degree is awarded.
• The Prescribing Safety Assessment, a national pass-or-fail exam on prescribing medicines safely. Surrey's module says you do not need it to graduate but must pass it to complete foundation training.
• The GMC's 2024/25 review said it would begin checking Surrey's preparations for both parts of the MLA, with further visits planned for early 2026.
• Attendance must be at least 80% in each strand, and in Years 2 and 3 in every rotation and pathway, with no averaging between pathways.
• Professional behaviour is tracked all year. Failing to submit an absence notification three times in a term or pathway brings negative feedback, and two negative reports in a term or pathway trigger a formal professionalism review.
• A fitness to practise panel considers every student. You cannot progress if judged not fit to practise, and you must be judged fit to practise to be awarded the degree.
• If you fail a main area of Year 4, you repeat all of that year's teaching and assessment the next year. There is one such chance, after which you would usually have to leave the course.

Placements run through all four years. In Year 1 they are single days in general practice and community mental health. In Years 2 and 3 you rotate through hospital and community placements across the South East, and in Year 4 you spend six weeks at a time with each clinical team. A clinical placements team at the University organises them.

Every placement provider is within commuting distance of the University. You pay travel costs upfront, and the University reimburses anything above your normal journey to campus. You do not need a driving licence, but the University says a car makes getting to placements easier, and drivers can claim extra for student passengers.

Surrey names its partners at trust level: five NHS trusts, two integrated care systems (ICSs, the NHS partnerships that plan care across an area) and a network of local GP practices. The list below gives each partner and what it provides. Because pathways and blocks come in different orders, your rotation sequence will not match everyone else's.

One partner publishes how it hosts Surrey students. Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs East Surrey Hospital in Redhill, says they stay with it for the whole academic year. They spend Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays on the wards, in outpatient clinics and in theatre. They work through the Medicine, Surgery and Specialties pathways, which match the three Year 2 pathways. Every Tuesday they return to the University for teaching. This is that trust's own arrangement, so the pattern elsewhere may differ.

Student-selected work runs through the course as special study units (SSUs). In Year 1 you choose a topic within biomedical science and work to a schedule set by the tutor running the unit, called the SSU facilitator. You then present your findings as a narrated oral presentation.

Year 2 has two units, Medical Humanities and Improving Healthcare, each a two-week block assessed by coursework. In both you find and weigh up evidence and use it to make recommendations for better care. Year 3 adds two more, Doctor as Teacher and Research.

The Year 4 elective lasts six weeks, and you choose and arrange it yourself. It can be clinical, research or leadership based, or a mix, and an elective in another country and health system can be considered. You first submit a proposal; if it still falls short after one resubmission, you cannot go.

Afterwards you are assessed on a report from your elective host and an A3 poster presentation, and you complete a health questionnaire and an online record of the experience. A locality electives advisor helps if your proposal or host report needs work.

The Kate Granger Building at 30 Priestley Road, on the Surrey Research Park, is shared by medicine, paramedic science, nursing and midwifery. It houses the Surrey Clinical Simulation Centre (SC2), which has two mock wards, a critical care unit, an ambulance bay, model operating theatres, an immersive learning room and a community flat.

The centre's manikins move, speak and react, and technical staff can change their breathing, pulse, blood pressure and oxygen levels as a scenario unfolds. A camera system records sessions for playback and feedback. An internal phone network mimics a hospital switchboard, so you can practise handovers and communication between rooms during emergencies. The Independent Clinical Learning Facility, in the same building, lets you practise skills with or without supervision.

CASE, the anatomy centre described above, also works with the Minimal Access Therapy Training Unit (MATTU), which gives access to a range of surgical simulation options. VRiMS provides a library of immersive surgical training videos that Surrey students can use.

Every student is given a university iPad for the whole course. Through SurreyLearn, the university's online learning platform, you reach a 3D anatomy platform, a curriculum map showing what you learn and where, quizzes, group exercises and discussion boards. Your e-portfolio records your learning on campus and on placement, tracks attendance and is set up like the portfolios used in postgraduate training.

Your main personal support in Year 1 is your Professional Development Group (PDG), a small group with a tutor who also acts as a mentor. You meet to reflect on placements and set goals. In Years 2 and 3 GP clinical tutors lead this work. In Year 4 clinical supervisors support you on placement, while PDG sessions (42 hours in the Year 4 module) and your PDG tutor continue alongside.

The course sets out who helps when something goes wrong. Concerns about professional behaviour are worked through with your PDG tutor or GP clinical tutor, OSCE difficulties with clinical skills tutors, and wider learning needs through referral back to your PDG tutor. In Year 4, if two or more of your case-based discussions by the end of the first term are rated below satisfactory, your PDG tutor arranges extra help. Practice tests come with quick feedback, including personalised data from the online exam systems.

In its 2024/25 review the GMC found the school's student support services foster a positive learning environment. It noted that students often went straight to the Director for Student Support, and recommended the school reduce its reliance on a small senior team as year groups grow. The school has secured funding to expand student support and revised its peer mentoring scheme during that year.