Program Overview

Feel like a doctor from day one – interact with real patients on wards from the start of your studies and gain a real sense of what it is like to work in a healthcare setting.

The majority of teaching takes place in Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, which means that your studies are centred around life in a working National Health Service (NHS) hospital. This clinical exposure underpins your knowledge and ensures you develop into a well-rounded junior doctor, fully prepared to practice.

With our open-door policy for all medical students, you will have the opportunity to access the wards, allowing you to speak to real patients at any time.

You'll use our Clinical Skills Centre with its purpose-built replica ward to learn your clinical skills. Here, you'll interact with real and simulated patients to practice what you'd do in real-life scenarios.

You can also experience our immersion room, a space designed to simulate the adrenaline of the emergency room, where you will tend to simulated patients and administer life-saving care.

We also have a Surgical Skills Centre where you'll learn the hands-on skills required for surgery and gain an understanding of surgical procedures.

The learning environment is modern and supportive and is complemented by several peripheral hospital sites and general practices located throughout Tayside and Scotland.

With around 220 students in each academic year, the size and structure of our medical school helps you get to know your fellow students and the academics and clinicians teaching you. You'll feel part of our community from the start.

Your studies start with a Foundation in Medicine block which explores the fundamental science that underpins the field of medicine – this will help you start to think like a doctor and begin clinical problem-solving.

Throughout your first three years you will learn about body systems and how they work, each year building on your existing knowledge through our spiral curriculum.

You'll also learn anatomy by dissection. We use Thiel-embalmed cadavers which retain life-like flexible tissue quality. This experience is as close to examining the anatomy of a living person as possible, and will give you an experience and understanding that no other medical school in the UK can offer.

From first year onwards you will receive teaching in clinical history taking and how to perform a clinical examination. Dundee is unusual in teaching this at such an early stage, and it pays off as our students are well-placed to get the most out of their clinical placements in later years.

After the first three years you’ll have the option to intercalate for an additional year and gain a BMSc in a range of subjects, allowing you to tailor your degree and study a topic in more depth.

Whether you decide to do this or not, in years four and five you move into clinical training. This is a series of placements that will give you a well-rounded experience in a number of clinical areas, enabling you to put your training into practice at the point of care for real patients in real healthcare settings.