Medicine with Foundation Year ,MBChB

The MBChB with Foundation Year is aimed at students who wish to study Medicine at the University of Leicester, but whose background makes it less likely that they will be able to meet the entry requirements for our standard five-year MBChB. Successful completion of the integrated Foundation Year will enable you to progress onto the first year of the MBChB course.

We are looking to attract 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 empathic doctors prepared to make patient care your first priority.

The first part of the Foundation Year is taught alongside Biological Science students before moving into Medicine-specific modules later in the year. You will meet patients and learn clinical skills during your foundation year. The course is designed to enable 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.

A pioneering and unique aspect of the Medicine with Foundation Year its bespoke empathy-focused curriculum. Our innovative course fosters your clinical empathy right from the very start of your training. You will learn through a person-centred approach to medicine with the understanding that empathy is a core value that will be central to your future practice. This is important because we know that treating people with empathy improves their experience of healthcare and is beneficial to practitioners too.

As a Foundation Year student, you will join our medical school community alongside other medical students. 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 in an established, supportive environment. Throughout the course, you will learn from expert academics and medical practitioners working day-to-day in the NHS.

Once you complete the Foundation Year, you will join our five-year medical course. We run an integrated curriculum, meaning 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 following the Foundation 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 clinical 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.