Medicine ,MBChB

Doctors are witness to the most joyful and difficult moments of people’s lives. It’s no wonder they have such meaningful and rewarding careers. We are looking to attract high-achieving, aspirational students, from all backgrounds, who display a caring attitude and values consistent with those of the NHS constitution. We aim to help you become skilled, professional and caring doctors prepared to make patient care your first priority.

2025 will mark our 50th anniversary, so we have plenty of experience of medical education at Leicester, which means that you will benefit from excellent training within an established, supportive community. Throughout the course, you will learn from expert academics and medical practitioners working day-to-day in the NHS. Their teaching is directly influenced by their expertise in a wide range of clinical disciplines, and in such diverse fields as heart disease, cancer and genetics – some of the areas where Leicester's research reputation is truly global. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), Leicester was ranked 2nd in the UK for its world leading research in Clinical Medicine. The 2024 Times Higher World University ranking also places Leicester joint 14th in the UK as well as in the top 125 in the world for Clinical and Health Sciences. Equally, our new multi-million pound Centre for Empathic Healthcare reflects our commitment to educating compassionate doctors.

Our course is truly patient-focussed, and enables you to take forward the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that are required to practise medicine effectively and successfully in the modern healthcare environment. You will be prepared for the challenges that we are experiencing today and the inevitable changes in practice that will continue to occur in the future.

We run an integrated curriculum. Teaching and learning is based around patients and their needs. It is not a problem-based learning course, but rather a patient-focused curriculum which is delivered through a mixture of lectures, small group work, cadaveric dissection and clinical teaching. This ensures that you learn the essential science underpinning how the human body operates, whilst learning how things can go wrong through the study of patients.

Your experience will be hands-on - you will work with real patients from the beginning. It's all designed to be clinically relevant - enabling you to acquire the medical knowledge, along with the professional competencies, that are essential to practise medicine effectively. In your first year, you gain the Health Care Certificate and hospital ward experience that allows you to work as a Healthcare Assistant. Simultaneously, through our Phase 1 Compassionate, Holistic, Diagnostic Detective course you start to develop consultation and examinations skills with actors and patients in our medical school and hospitals, preparing you for Phase 2 (years 3-5) where you will be based full-time in hospital, general practice and community placements.

Our world-class facilities provide a state-of-the art learning environment and allow you to experience what other medical students don’t. For example, we are one of the few courses to offer full-body human dissection. All first year students are provided with iPads. Study material is delivered directly onto these iPads. All the resources you need will be at your fingertips throughout the clincal phase of the course.

You will also have the chance to develop your clinical procedures in our state-of-the-art Clinical Skills Unit. During the clinical phase of the course, we offer a wide range of hospital and community placements in the region, including Leicester’s big city hospitals, and district centres across the Midlands, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire. This means you gain valuable experience in a diverse range of environments.

If you’re interested in medical research and/or enhancing your career prospects, you can take an intercalated degree by undertaking full-time research with experts at Leicester or elsewhere.

Towards the end of the course, there are additional opportunities to take an elective placement in a location of your choice - it could be anywhere in the world.

National Student Survey results

We are really proud to have some of the most satisfied medical students in the UK. Our outstanding teaching and learning environment was reflected in our National Student Survey (NSS) 2024 results, where we were ranked 1st in the UK in subjects aligned to Medicine for overall positivity. (According to Times Higher Education NSS 2023 methodology applied to the NSS 2024 data.)

We also ranked 1st or 2nd in subjects aligned to Medicine on question themes concerning ‘Student Voice’, ‘Teaching on my Course’, Assessment and Feedback’, ‘Learning Opportunities’, and ‘Organisation and Management’.

And as a Medical School, which therefore teaches vocational degrees, we are especially proud of being ranked top in subjects aligned to Medicine on the question “How well has your course developed your knowledge and skills that you think you will need for your future?”

The 2024 NSS comprised 27 core questions covering academic experience, teaching and assessments, and well-being services. It was completed by almost 346,000 final year students in the UK and gives feedback on their university experience. This is a fantastic result and a huge testament to the way staff and students collaborate at Leicester Medical School to make it such a great place to study medicine. However, being a great medical school depends on us not settling for how we are now but also striving to be even better in the future, and we continue to be committed to listening to student feedback, reflecting on our performance and looking for new ways to improve our curriculum.

Application date

Medical degrees have a UCAS application deadline of 15 October, three months ahead of most other courses.

IELTS 7.5 with at least 7.0 in each component. If your first language is not English, you may need to provide evidence of your English language ability. If you do not yet meet our requirements, our English Language Teaching Unit (ELTU) offers a range of courses to help you to improve your English to the necessary standard.