The University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) Medicine course

Years 1 and 2 form Phase 1 of the course and are taught on the Preston campus. Your timetable is busy, with large-group lectures, tutorials, clinical skills and anatomy workshops, and small-group communication skills sessions. There is a strong emphasis on the basic medical sciences alongside communication and clinical skills. You also learn how to weigh up clinical and scientific evidence.

You do not learn only with medical students. The school runs inter-professional sessions, where you learn alongside students on other healthcare courses, including pharmacy and nursing. The aim is to get you used to working in a team of different health professionals, which is how patients are looked after in practice.

From Year 3 the balance flips. Most of your learning becomes work-based, on supervised placements in hospitals, GP practices and community services, with one campus day a week. Case-based learning runs through Years 3 and 4, with exam-style questions built into the sessions. Self-directed study time is written into your placement timetable.

Throughout the course you keep an e-portfolio on a platform called PebblePad. You use it to log attendance, reflections, clinical case logs and the forms from meetings with your supervisors. The portfolio is part of your formal assessment, not just a record.

The school says medicine has no single typical week, because the pattern changes as you move through the course. In Years 1 and 2 most of your week is on the Preston campus: lectures, tutorials, clinical skills and anatomy workshops, and small-group communication sessions, with placements at set points in the year.

A Year 1 GP placement runs over four days of about eight hours each, for example 9am to 5pm. The school's sample timetable has you sitting in reception, watching GP and practice nurse clinics, taking observations in a healthcare assistant's clinic, taking a structured history from a patient and joining home visits. You also spend time with the clinical pharmacist and the practice management team.

On the Year 3 general practice module, a week is built from six half-day placement sessions, one campus day and two half-days of self-directed learning. The practice can timetable sessions on any day of the week, including evenings, or as a long shift of up to about 12 hours, mirroring Foundation Year 1 work. At least one weekend day stays free. The sample week puts the campus day on Tuesday and a home study day on Friday.

In Year 5, placement blocks average three days a week and can include nights and weekends. In general practice the sample timetable has you running your own student clinics in the mornings and afternoons, with supervised home visits in between. You also have one campus day each week, on a Monday or a Thursday.

Anatomy is taught in the early years through anatomy workshops on the Preston campus. A central tool is the Anatomage table, a virtual dissection table that displays 3D male and female anatomy built from real patient scans or cadavers. Instead of a scalpel, you use your hands on the 3D model to cut through it and reveal structures such as organs and muscles.

The Preston campus has two of these tables in the Anatomage Suites in the Greenbank Building. The Burnley campus has its own Anatomage suite, and a virtual dissection table is also listed in the clinical skills kit at Victoria Mill. At Westlakes, one of the clinical skills rooms doubles as a human anatomy resource centre, with a wide selection of anatomical models and an Anatomage table.

The university's medicine pages also describe Human Anatomy Resource and Learning Centres, which hold anatomical models for learning how the body is built and works. The equipment those pages list includes virtual dissection tables and virtual reality (VR) headsets. One course page photo shows an MBBS student using VR simulation equipment, and others show medical students working with microscopes in an anatomy lab and using ultrasound equipment.

You meet patients in Year 1, with one placement in a GP practice and one in community clinics. Your primary care placement falls in the second semester. In Years 1 and 2 the focus is on how primary care works and on its multidisciplinary team, meaning the GPs, nurses, pharmacists, receptionists and other staff who look after patients together.

The tasks are specific. In Year 1 you take a focused history that explores the patient's ideas, concerns and expectations. You also carry out a supervised examination and feel the pulse at the wrist of five patients, noting its rate, rhythm and volume. In Year 2 you present a history to your GP supervisor, do at least two supervised examinations and take full sets of observations, including a manual blood pressure, from five stable patients.

Year 2 also brings a hospital placement, as part of 12 days of placement designed to prepare you for Year 3. On GP placements from Year 3 you are expected to act as a member of the practice team with your own caseload. That means clerking patients, which is taking a full history and examination and writing it up, and presenting cases to doctors.

By Year 5 you are expected to consult on your own under supervision. In general practice you run a student surgery, with patients booked in directly with you. You take the history, examine where appropriate, work out the possible diagnoses and a plan, write the notes and present to your supervisor, who then reviews the patient. Some of these may start as supervised phone or video consultations.

You are assessed through a mix of continuous assessment and regular exams. There is formative assessment, which gives you feedback without counting towards your result, at the end of the first semester and informally through the year. End-of-year exams include computer-based knowledge tests, oral and poster presentations, and Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs). You must pass every module in a year to move on to the next.

An OSCE is a practical exam where you move round a series of timed stations, each testing a clinical task such as examining a patient or explaining a diagnosis. Written papers mainly use single best answer (SBA) questions and constructed response questions, where you write your own short answers. Professionalism is assessed throughout the course.

Your e-portfolio counts too. In Years 1 and 2 it is assessed formatively mid-year and summatively at the end of the year, and you must complete every part of it to graduate.

On placement you complete workplace-based assessments, where a trained assessor watches you with real patients. These are the mini-CEX, the direct observations of procedural skills (DOPS) and the case-based discussions described in the year-by-year section. Your supervisor also judges whether each placement was satisfactory, and on Year 3 modules a not yet satisfactory grade may mean retaking the module.

The Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) is a national computer-based exam produced by the Medical Schools Council, the body that represents UK medical schools. The GMC's 2024 decision on the school describes it as two papers of 100 SBA questions, each lasting two hours, sat on consecutive days. It is set at the standard of a new doctor in the first week of Foundation Year 1. You sit it at the end of Year 4 and can be reassessed once in the same year.

The Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA) is an OSCE at the end of Year 5. In 2024 the school told the GMC it was moving from 16 stations over two days to 15 stations of 15 minutes each over three days, starting in 2024-25. To pass you must meet the overall standard and also pass at least 11 stations, so strong stations cannot cover for too many weak ones. The GMC found in April 2024 that the exam met its requirements, with no mandatory changes.

In Years 1 and 2 you are based at the Preston campus and go out on short placements in GP practices, community clinics and, in Year 2, a hospital. Before any placement you need an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check, which the university arranges. You also complete e-learning for your year that includes safeguarding adults and children and resuscitation.

For Years 3, 4 and 5 you must relocate. You are based near either the Burnley campus in East Lancashire, at Victoria Mill, or the Westlakes campus in Cumbria, home to the school's National Centre for Remote and Rural Medicine. The school tries to take your preference into account, but it may allocate your campus. Placements are in the area around your base, in both primary care (GP practices and community services) and secondary care (hospitals).

The two bases are quite different places to live. The university's Sandygate Hall in Burnley has 136 en-suite rooms in 29 flats, a short walk from Victoria Mill. Westlakes sits on a science and technology park three miles from Whitehaven, with free parking, its own student support team and public transport into town. The Lake District is nearby.

Placements are run like a job. The school expects 100% attendance, and each half-day on placement is signed off by the staff member you were with in a paper logbook, as well as on your e-portfolio timesheet. If you cannot attend, you tell the placement provider directly before your start time. You also attend a health and safety induction at each placement.

You complete student selected components (SSCs), the pieces of work where you choose or shape the topic, in each year. They are how the course builds your research skills over the five years.

In Year 3 your SSC is a clinical audit carried out during the nine-week general practice module. An audit checks whether care in the practice meets an agreed standard. You confirm your topic, criteria and standards by the end of week two. Three placement sessions are set aside for planning and data collection, and the rest is done in your home study time.

Year 5 includes a compulsory research block and specialty blocks that you choose, either to explore a possible career or to try an area you have not seen yet. Your Year 5 assessments include written reports on your SSC work.

Intercalating means taking a year out of the medical course to study for another degree. Here it is optional and selective: after Year 4, high-performing students may be offered an additional year to gain a master's degree.

The School of Medicine and Dentistry runs a 12-month full-time MRes in Medical Sciences, which it describes as designed partly for intercalating medical students who want to pursue research. The school also supports the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) integrated clinical academic training programme, which offers funded research opportunities to undergraduates as well as to newly qualified doctors.

On the Preston campus, the Clinical Skills Suite in the Harrington Building is a large simulated ward with 21 bays and beds. It has medium-fidelity manikins, basic life support manikins and many part-task trainers for practising procedures. Fidelity means how closely a manikin behaves like a real patient. Every bed space has a camera, so examinations and simulation sessions can be filmed and recorded.

The Simulated Hospital Environment is a second ward-style lab with eight bays and beds, simulated oxygen and suction at each bed, and three medium-fidelity Juno manikins. It is used for larger-group training such as resuscitation, drug administration and asepsis, the techniques that keep procedures free of germs. The Patient Assessment rooms in the Greenbank Building include two rooms set up as GP consulting rooms and a small simulated flat for scenarios set in a patient's home.

At Burnley, the clinical skills labs in Victoria Mill have CAE Ares and Juno patient simulators and airway, catheterisation and cannulation manikins. They also have a 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) machine, which records the heart's electrical activity, and an Anatomage table.

At Westlakes, the John Fyfe Building has a high-fidelity simulation suite. Its two computer-controlled adult simulators can be programmed to react realistically to your treatment, and the room has a cardiac arrest trolley with a defibrillator and ceiling cameras. The building also has a small-group room for practising injections, taking blood and suturing.

In Years 1 and 2 you have a named portfolio tutor for each year, who reads your e-portfolio entries regularly and gives feedback. In the clinical years an academic advisor assesses your clinical case logs. If you fail the knowledge exam, your module lead and academic advisor give you personal support to catch up. On the Year 3 general practice module you meet your named GP supervisor at the start, midpoint and end.

A workplace-based skills tutor helps you arrange and complete your assessments on placement, and there are Year 5 skills facilitators at both Burnley and Westlakes. A team of GP tutors oversees general practice placements and talks to the practice if students raise important concerns about it.

The school has a Professionalism, Wellbeing and Safety Tutor, and placement staff can report a wellbeing or safety concern about a student through a formal form, as well as positive feedback. The GMC noted in 2024 that the school also offers course-specific pastoral support all year, especially around the release of high-stakes exam results. The school works with disability placement leads to make reasonable adjustments on placement.

You have a say in how the course runs. You complete an evaluation at the end of every clinical module, a Staff Student Liaison Committee meets each term, and an online platform called Unitu lets you raise issues and suggest solutions. The school reports back on changes in You Said, We Did sessions twice a year. Medical student societies also run talks, suturing workshops, peer mentoring and teaching.