The Warwick (GEM) Medicine course

Case-based learning (CBL) sits at the centre of all four years. Warwick likens it to problem-based learning (PBL), in which a small group works through a patient case and decides for itself what it needs to learn. Each CBL case is invented but realistic, built on a common or important condition and linked to that week's lectures. The aim is to build clinical reasoning, the way a doctor thinks through a problem, as well as knowledge.

The students lead each session. A facilitator sits with the group but does not teach: this tutor helps you work well together and prompts the group only when it needs it. On a ward, doctors try to narrow a case down to a diagnosis quickly. CBL does the opposite, using the case as a framework to explore each topic widely and in depth.

In Year 1 most teaching is on campus: lectures, CBL sessions, clinical and communication skills, anatomy and practical workshops. Your CBL group has around 9 or 10 students, although Warwick's course information page puts it at 8 to 10. It mixes science, non-science and clinical backgrounds and stays the same all year. Other small-group sessions range from 8 to 15 students, depending on the activity.

Year 2 is a planned shift from the classroom to the ward. An academic block of advanced cases, group work, self-study and focused lectures eases the move. In Core Clinical Education, most of your time is spent in clinical settings, attached to groups of consultants from many specialties.

By Years 3 and 4 you direct much of your own learning, working closely with clinical teams and patients. As the course goes on you take on more shift work, extended hours and on-call duties, where you are available outside normal hours to help with patients who need urgent care. Throughout, you keep an e-portfolio, an online record of your progress and reflections, much like the one you will use as a junior doctor.

Expect a full week. In Year 1 you have about 35 hours of timetabled teaching a week. Warwick's admissions FAQ says this runs for 30 weeks, although the module catalogue lists the Year 1 module as 26 weeks long. From Year 2 your week follows your clinical placement and is shaped like a doctor's working week.

Warwick's 2022/23 prospectus gave an example Year 1 week. Treat it as a guide to the pattern rather than a current timetable. Monday combined a face-to-face CBL session, lectures, group work and workshops.

Tuesday was flexible: time to work through online teaching, a community day with patient visits, or more lectures and group work. Wednesday was set aside as Wellbeing Wednesday, apart from one Wednesday in Term 1 used for clinical skills training at a hospital trust.

On Thursday the year split into four groups, which took turns at CBL and at clinical skills, clinical anatomy and imaging teaching. Friday brought more clinical skills, anatomy and imaging sessions, with half the groups in the morning and half in the afternoon.

The 2026/27 module catalogue shows the overall balance. It plans 1,200 hours of study for Year 1. Of these, 505 hours are self-directed study, 150 are case-based learning and 49 are on placement. The rest is lectures, seminars and practical classes.

Warwick teaches anatomy with plastinated prosections and cross-sections from Gunther von Hagens' Plastinarium in Germany. A cross-section is a thin slice through the body, which shows how organs sit next to each other. Anatomy starts in Year 1, taught alongside clinical skills and imaging.

Warwick's video on clinical anatomy and imaging describes several formats that build on each other. Lectures set the scene, and you use them to prepare for a Friday session with real human specimens. Small-group teaching puts you close to the anatomy staff, so you can ask questions and get things wrong without pressure. There is also a Monday medical imaging session, and drawing activities help pull it all together.

Plastination starts with an embalmed body that has been dissected. The water and fat in the tissue are replaced first with acetone, a solvent, and then with liquid plastic that is hardened. The result does not decompose. Warwick notes that preparing one whole-body plastinate takes 1,000 to 1,500 hours of work.

You study the specimens in the Clinical Education Hub, a clinical anatomy and skills building at the Beehive, a university site near the Gibbet Hill campus. It is licensed by the Human Tissue Authority (HTA), which regulates places that store and use human tissue. The university gears this anatomy teaching to clinical practice and procedures, including point-of-care ultrasound: a quick scan done at the bedside to help with diagnosis.

You meet patients from your first week. In each Year 1 block there is a patient of the week, and you meet patients in community settings to see healthcare from their side. You also begin supervised bedside learning in the NHS partner hospitals, practising history taking and examination.

By the end of Year 1 you will have spent time on hospital wards and on community placements across the region. In Year 2 clinical work takes over. Placements take you to acute hospitals, GP surgeries, mental health services and community care. You join ward rounds, outpatient clinics and multidisciplinary team meetings, where doctors, nurses and other professionals plan a patient's care together.

Formative assessments carry no marks, but they are not optional. You take one at the end of each block. You must complete them, and meet the engagement and attendance requirements, before you are allowed to sit the summative exams, the ones that count. These come at the end of Year 1, the end of Year 2 and in Year 4, each with a written and a clinical part. Year 3 is assessed through the engagement criteria and your research project instead.

Every year you must also meet engagement criteria: evidence of academic and professional development, and at least 80 per cent attendance, which Warwick says the GMC requires. A strong exam cannot make up for missing them, or the other way round, because each part must be passed on its own. Everyone normally gets individual electronic feedback within two working days of summative results, and students below the pass mark are offered face-to-face feedback.

Since 2024-25 a UK medical degree must include a pass in the MLA to count as a primary medical qualification, the qualification a graduate needs to register with the GMC. The MLA has two parts: the Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) and the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA). At Warwick you sit both in Year 4 and must pass both in the same graduation year.

Years 3 and 4 add practice assessments in every specialist placement block, as Warwick described them in its submission for the GMC's 2024 decision. Each block has an online test in the same format as the AKT and a practice OSLER. There is also a mini-CEX, where a senior watches you with a patient and gives feedback, and a case-based discussion, where you talk a senior through a patient you have seen. You also write reflections, and you must complete all of this to reach finals.

The GMC confirmed in 2024 that Warwick's AKT and CPSA meet its rules, and the 2026/27 module catalogue still lists an OSCE and an OSLER as the Year 4 clinical exam. The finer details below come from the GMC's review of what Warwick submitted in late 2022, so some may since have changed. The final degree is unclassified, although the Board of Examiners can award it with honours against its own criteria.

• AKT: the national version, with papers supplied by the Medical Schools Council. It is two computer-based papers of 100 single best answer questions, where you pick the best of several options. Each paper lasts two hours, on consecutive days.
• OSCE: ten stations, each seven minutes with three minutes' reading time, run on campus in one day. In the version the GMC reviewed you needed to pass seven of the ten.
• OSLER: six 45-minute cases with real patients, over two hospital sites on two days in one week. In each you spend 15 minutes taking a history and examining, 15 thinking, and 15 presenting to two examiners.
• The OSCE and OSLER are about two weeks apart, and failing either means resitting both.
• Warwick Prescribing Assessment: Warwick's own in-person written exam on prescribing, separate from the national Prescribing Safety Assessment. In 2026/27 it carries 10 per cent of Year 4.
• You practise both formats in earlier years. Talks at the start of Year 3 and three months before finals explain them, and an online question-and-answer page is kept updated. The GMC's reviewers named this preparation as effective practice.
• If you fail the OSCE or OSLER you are offered a one-to-one meeting with its lead to plan revision. Because the resit falls in the elective period, you take a directed elective at a partner hospital so you can be supported.

Warwick names five partner hospitals. University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) runs two of them: University Hospital at Walsgrave in Coventry and the Hospital of St Cross in Rugby. The others are George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton, Warwick Hospital and the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch.

From the middle of Year 2 you are placed mainly in acute hospital care in Coventry, Nuneaton, Rugby and Warwick. Acute care is hospital treatment for sudden or serious illness, including emergencies and operations.

About 80 partner GP practices and other community placements lie within roughly 40 miles of the university, reaching the eastern edges of Birmingham, Worcester and Northamptonshire, and some are rural. You are expected to live within a reasonable distance and you arrange your own travel between placements. The NHS Bursary is NHS funding for eligible students from England in Years 2, 3 and 4. If you receive it, you may be able to claim back some extra travel costs.

General practice runs through the course, in four different surgeries. The pattern set out here is how the GMC described it in a case study featuring student feedback from 2023. In Year 2 you visit three practices, once a week for 21 weeks, and lead consultations while the GP watches and gives feedback.

You also spend extended time with patients and carry out a clinical audit, which means checking a practice's care against an agreed standard. The practices range from urban to rural and include areas with many refugees, high deprivation or many elderly patients.

In Year 3 or 4 comes a six-week specialist GP placement, three days a week, where you run independent surgeries. You return to the medical school each week for tutorials and video at least two consultations for feedback. Across your GP placements you may also join minor operations, home visits and community hospital visits, and work with paramedics, physiotherapists and pharmacists.

A student-selected component (SSC) is a part of the course where you choose the topic. Warwick has two. In Year 2 you pick SSC1 from a list that changes from year to year, each option linked to the core curriculum but letting you go deeper.

Recent SSC1 options include Counselling Skills, Global Health, Clinical Ethics and Law, Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine, Simulation in Medical Education, Sleep, Health and Society, and The Digital Doctor. There is also a medical humanities option built around George Eliot's novel Middlemarch.

SSC2 is your Year 3 research project. You choose an area for in-depth enquiry and can build on your SSC1 topic. Lectures and workshops on scientific methods support the project, which counts for 20 per cent of the Year 3 module.

The elective comes in Year 4 and lasts five to six weeks, according to Warwick's admissions FAQ; the Year Four page gives six. It is set up as a project: you study a field of healthcare or human health in more depth. It can be anywhere you choose, in the UK or abroad, and students often go overseas to see medicine in a different country and culture. You pay for the elective yourself, though elective bursaries are available.

The Clinical Education Hub at the Beehive is a £4.2 million clinical anatomy and clinical skills building. It opened to students in October 2023 and was formally launched in June 2024. Besides the anatomy space it has flexible wet labs, which are rooms equipped for handling biological material. It also has a mock hospital ward, clinical rooms and an augmented and virtual reality suite that recreates real situations.

You spend most of Year 1 at Gibbet Hill campus, a short walk from the main campus. On the ground floor of the Medical School Building, the Biomedical Learning Grid gives you group and individual study space, interactive boards and a collection of key reference books.

At UHCW, the Clinical Sciences Building has a 250-seat lecture theatre, linked seminar rooms, a library, a Clinical Simulation Centre and a Clinical Skills Wing. Clinical skills teaching there uses a talking, life-size mannequin called Sim Man. A surgical training centre, opened in 2009, teaches operative techniques on cadaveric material, meaning tissue from people who have died, in realistic operating theatres.

Pastoral support is led by the MB ChB Senior Tutor. Each year group has its own Deputy Senior Tutor, and you can take any personal, professional, health or pastoral problem affecting your studies to them or to your tutor. The team is based in the Student Support Hub in the Medical Teaching Centre.

You have a personal tutor from the start. The 2022/23 prospectus describes meetings in induction week and each term until Phase 2, then a handover during Year 2 to a clinical personal tutor. That tutor is your main contact for the rest of the course and helps you review progress and set learning targets.

Warwick runs a buddy scheme, and students in later years teach those in earlier years. Its peer-support page, last updated in 2022, lists weekly seminars where Year 2 students re-teach Year 1 content and an evening clinical skills group that practises before OSCEs. It also describes a teaching group run by and for students without a biology background. Student societies run anatomy and physiology days for each block.

There are two Disabled Student Champions and a Senior Careers Consultant dedicated to the medical school. Two academic support librarians help with literature searches and referencing. The prospectus also lists undergraduate administrators and consultants linked to medical education in the partner trusts, to support you on placement.