Healthcare Improvement (Intercalated)

Studying medicine gives you a clear path to becoming a doctor, but what if you'd like the opportunity to study a specific topic in more detail or explore a more lab-based or theoretical area of medicine? This is where an intercalated degree could be of benefit.

With an intercalated degree you can spend a year studying a topic of interest. This allows you to:

• become more informed about different options for your career post-graduation
• gain new transferable skills, including research skills
• get a deeper insight into a subject area that interests you

Improvement science is a field where academics and front-line practitioners work together to advance healthcare and make the processes within the system work better for everyone. In this course, you'll work with a clinical team on an improvement project and use research methods to study the barriers and facilitators to improvement. You'll explore systems-based approaches - some of which have their origins in engineering and aviation - and you'll develop skills in creativity, resilience, influencing, and systems thinking.

You'll look at how human factors and behaviour change theory can be used to understand, analyse, and improve health care delivery through cycles of change, before focusing on an area of interest in epidemiology, ethnography or statistics.

The knowledge and skills you'll gain on this course will be useful if you'd like to help shape healthcare systems and improve processes in your career post-graduation. You will also gain extra points for academic achievement that could help with applications to foundation training after you graduate from your MBChB or equivalent.